Video Conferencing




Something I would like to expand upon …ie write a little more after I have asked a few more questions.

 

A year ago I witnessed a video conference session from London to Birmingham which had some remarkable results. Pupils who one would normally call troublesome behaved perfectly. For a detailed report on this look  at www.bgfl.org/casestudies . The remarkable thing about this was that the pupils thought that the major impact on their behaviour was distance.

 

Today I was having a chat with a teacher who is working on an experimental setup where the year 8 pupils at his secondary are delivering MFL (French) to year 6 in a local primary using video conferencing. I witnessed a quite remarkable session where 6 year 8’s delivered teaching sessions to groups of 4/5 Year 6’s for 15 minutes each time. A major thought in my mind was the behaviour of the pupils…again exemplary. The physicist/psychologist/sociologist controlling this exercise expressed the opinion that the behaviour was due to space. In video conferencing the pupils feel that their personal space has been expanded and act accordingly. What a fantastic concept. I need to examine this more closely.

 

 

Published in: on January 18, 2006 at 10:11 pm Comments (3)
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3 Comments

  1. on January 18, 2006 at 11:10 pm James Farmer Said:

    It is interesting, especially when instinctively (for me) the use of videoconferencing between classrooms that are both in the UK screams “pointless… why don’t you just get people together to talk”.

    ‘Owever, I suppose it’s going to become an increasing reality in all walks of life so it has value there and in terms of this experience it looks like it’s facilitating the development of other skills / attributes.

    Especially interesting compared to the often subversive use of tools like blogs (at least as far as I can see) by students… definitely not ‘exemplary’ behaviour!!!

    But then do we place too much value in good behaviour.

    Gah.

    Oh, here’s the direct link to that case study (.doc): http://tinyurl.com/b82h5

  2. on January 20, 2006 at 3:43 pm mikefarmer Said:

    In this situation the two schools might be ‘just across the road’ but the logistics of moving a class of primary or secondary pupils from one venue to another is horrendous. You would also have the unsettling nature of the new environment to contend with. Add to this potential timetable clashes and the immediacy of video conferencing makes it all seem like a doddle.

    Good behaviour in a busy classroom environment is essential. Good behaviour however does need soem definition ….it is not sitting in rows being quiet. In these circumstances it was listening to what other people were saying (VC seems quite good at that), being questioning and being polite when asking questions, answering and so on. Video conferencing does seem to promote this type of behaviour in kids.

    In Birmingham we are just about to embark on an investiagtion of the Polycom PVX system. Several primaries are getting several of them for a variety of projects. Can anyone out there quote experiences?

  3. on January 23, 2006 at 9:58 pm James Farmer Said:

    Very true, spoken like someone with plenty experience in trying!

    If you want to get feedback from the community the best thing to do is to post it to your blog as a post (rather than as a comment – which is what you’ve done here). People subscribing to your RSS feed won’t receive comments (on the whole although they do have their own RSS feed) so why not write a post titled something like “Which Video Conference Systems?”, share your own experiences and ask for help from other people.

    Good work responding to my comment BTW :)