SOMEs = Self-Organized Mediation Environments

8 October 2009

MAIM - Grade 7 students

I'm Teresa and I live in the suburbs of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. I was an English teacher for 33 years and I retired 6 months ago. I loved teaching and being in the classroom with my students.

Here's my photo.

And here's a map of where I am (blue marker on the left) and where you are (blue marker on the right). We're very far away geographically, but very close through Skype!

Agenda

• my intro and map
• students' intro and names in the text chat area in Skype
• what they like to do in their free time
• what are their favorite subjects at school
• reading "Maisie and the Dolphin" by Stephen Rabley (Easy Starts, Longman, 1997)
• pre-reading 
  • summary of the story: "Maisie lives in the Caribbean. She is unhappy because her parents haven't got enough money to keep their animal hospital open. However, Maisie's friendship with a dolphin leads to a discovery which changes everything."
  • who knows where the Caribbean is? No? Well, open this World Atlas and try to find that region of the world
• reading
• Q&A

Feedback on the live session

When I logged in to Skype, I had a contact from MAIM at once. The students were arriving. In the meantime I had a video chat with Suneeta in another window. She liked the books behind me - it's my living/dining room all in one - so she showed me that it's the same at her house. She also logged in to the chat with the children, just listening.

I started to talk with the children. There were 5 girls - Raziya, Neha, Fouzita, Humera and Shaista - and one boy, Arif. They wrote their names in the text chat area, because I have trouble understanding them. They also wrote their ages after I asked them: 12 and one is 13.

I told them that I have two boys at university. They asked me to say their names and write tme in the chat area. Arif pronounced both names very well. They also asked about my husband I wrote his name and pronounced it. They pronounced it very well in sipte of the very difficult nasal sound for foreigners.

I told them we were very far away and tried to show them the map above with the webcam, but they couldn't see it.

I asked if they liked stories and they all excitedly said "Yes!!!". I told them about the story I was going to read. They asked for the title in the chat area. I said that Maisie and a dolphin. She was their age and lived far away in Central America, in the Bahamas. They didn't know where it was and they weren't able to open the URL of the World Atlas.

As I finished reading each page, I'd show the picture in front of the webcam. They are a bit on the light side and not always easy to distinguish well, so I tried to explain where things were. They were very enthusiastic and wrote two comments during the reading: "fishes is the food of ben" and "why say grandfather sorry". I didn't notice teh question, so I didn't answer it. Shame on me!

When there were only two pages to go and excitement was increasing, they lost my video, I lost their sound and they lost mine. My video (in the menu) was inactive. Nothing I could do. I asked Suneeta to say that I was going to log off and on again, but the problems persisted. There was nothing I could do but promise that I'd finish next week. I wrote: "no sound for me :-(  i'm so sorry, children  can we continue next week? i'll finish the story about maisie and ben then". And they wrote back: "ok. we will meet next week". And I finished with (in the text chat area): "sorry about all this! technology has these things. i really loved being here with you!! bye, bye! be good  :-)"

Suneeta said that I'd been with them a good 40 minutes. She was chatting with them and they were telling her about the session. They told her that they were going to search for some dolphin pictures on the net today. What a great finale!  :-)

Tech thoughts and a suggestion

I've been thinking about the glitch on my side and then remembered seeing that there are two types of calls: the normal call and a video call. I don't remember the type of call made by MAIM, but the problem may be related to this. I'll have to try things out with friends worldwide.

I think that if we didn't use video the whole time, which takes up a lot of bandwidth, the students in India would have a much better chance of opening sites that I could give them with different activities.

During my trial session a couple of months ago there were problems opening sites like the British Council. It could have been lack of bandwidth due to the video

I suggest having video during the first 5 minutes and then 5 more minutes at the end, before we log out, and just voice to carry out most of the session and see if they're able to open other online activities. This way students can slowly get used to clicking on links that are pasted in the text chat area and following online instructions from the moderator about what to do.