Still Alive

Yes, this blog is still alive. I single handedly support both this blog and the VirtuED blog. Over the past two months we’ve had a HUGE number of things going on that have drained my time away from these two blogs.

With the school year coming to a close, I will actually get some time to catch up and bring these blogs up to current. I have a ton of updates and pictures from our Kyoto Spring Break Exchange to post to the VirtuED blog. We’ve had to completely reschedule our summer school for February due to travel restrictions for students in Japan travelling to the US due to the swine flu pandemic.

Too many things to list here have fully occupied my time of late. But never fear, over the next few weeks these pages will be updated and back on track. Lots of exciting things are planned for this next school year, with the possibility of some cool things this summer now that the Kyoto summer school is off. So check back soon and you’ll see a whole bunch of updates, and a return to a regular posting of info to these sites.

Virtual Japanese Lessons – Skoolaborate

This past Wednesday we had our second virtual ‘Survival Japanese’ lessons on the Skoolaborate Islands. This one went a lot better than the first. We are trying to repurpose an existing socializing seating object that randomizes pairs of avatars. It’s actually quite slick, but lacks the flexibility we need for this type of exercise (especially when the students are not balanced in numbers). The students all sit down on stools before the object is activated:

The instructor then sets the amount of time each pair of avatars are together. The first session week before last we used five minutes for each pairing. This time we set it to three minutes. Once activated, the stools are teleported to floating platforms in pairs:

As you can see from the outfits, these two avatars are paired correctly. The Modesto students all downloaded lessons from the Skoolaborate Wiki prior to these exercises. Every Kyoto avatar had three phrases they were going to teach. Here is an example from one student:

Each pair of students had three minutes to work through the proper pronunciations of their phrases, being guided by the Kyoto student. While flying around observing, the pods were spaced just right to eliminate any sound carrying between conversations. The spacing of the pods occupies a very large area of the sky above an island. Here’s a shot from roof level looking up at the student pods during the language lessons:

While this is very promising, we continue to have issues with this scripted object. We cannot guarantee that only mixed pairs will be made, too often we end up with two students from the same school, or even worse a single student isolated by themselves for three minutes with nothing to do.

What we need is a device that has two groups of different colored seats. One school sits in one set of seats, the others take opposite seats. When the pods are floated and avatars teleported we always get proper pairings of students. What would be even better is if you have uneven groups that the object could make three way pairings when the number of students do not match up exactly (for sake of the lesson, identifying in advance which group was teaching so there were always only one of them in a group).

If anyone in the Second Life community knows of a scripted object like this, and can point us in the right direction so we can acquire one, we would be very interested. If this sounds like a project any developers want to take on, drop me an email at pacrimx@comcast.net and we can talk. We are so close to what we need for this, it’s frustrating not being able to make this do what we want for these types of lessons.

We would also be interested in the experiences of anyone else who has attempted these sorts of lessons in Second Life using pairings of students. We like this concept, as it takes away the wasted time and confusion of a ground based seating arrangement that requires the avatars to get up and relocate after each lesson.

Drop us a line.

First ‘Survival Japanese’ Lessons

Today was our first ‘Survival Japanese’ class. We conducted the class via a video conference link. The classes are set up in the Skoolaborate online units area of the members only website. The Kyoto class uploaded a PowerPoint of the Hiragana they were going to teach the Modesto students. We had this up on a big screen to the side of the HD monitor used for the video conference link.

Each Kyoto student had several pages of Hiragana characters, a sample of a Japanese word that incorporated each character, and a translation. The Kyoto student would hold up their page so we could synch the PowerPoint to the video.  They would then pronounce the character. The Modesto students would repeat the pronunciation, and then repeat several times with the Kyoto student. The Kyoto student would pronounce the Japanese word, sounding out each part with the Modesto students following along. Finally, the Kyoto student would pronounce the English translation of the Japanese word.

At one point, the English translation was ‘Fuzzy Caterpillar”. That got some laughs and comments about how we hopefully would not need any of those on our trip. The students went through their lessons several times to learn the characters. Next the Kyoto students held up cards without the supporting text to test the Modesto students to see if they could recognize the characters.

This was a great first lesson. By the end we were all recognizing some of the characters and it was great to hear a native Japanese speaker pronouncing the characters and words for us. We have two students that have been to Japan and are fairly proficient with Hiragana. One of these students was helping us with the characters we were not recognizing. There were many laughs today between the students, especially when we were practicing ‘MU’.

Imagine two groups of students echoing MU’s back and forth to each other in a video conference. It wasn’t long before there were some laughs and Moo’s from both sides. The students are getting more comfortable and confident with each other with each of these joint events. Today I had one student come up after the class asking if he could request a specific student from the video conference for his host family.

Next week we will be doing greetings and introductions. I am very eager to see just how much of this we all remember when we are on our exchange trip to Kyoto.   さようなら 

Survival Japanese Lessons

This Wednesday the Kyoto Students will start their weekly ‘Survival Japanese’ lessons for Modesto students that are travelling to Japan this April during their Spring Break.

The purpose of these lessons is twofold. The Kyoto students can teach the Modesto students how to recognize letters and numbers and to speak basic words in Japanese (which will require them to communicate in English with the Modesto students). And this will again provide opportunities to build friendships between the students before they meet in April.

This week we will be using the K12Video.org service (part of the K12 High Speed Network) to conduct the class over a video conference link between Japan and the US. The remaining lessons will be moved in-world to Second Life on the Skoolaborate islands in the Education zone. Chris Flesuras tells me that they have acquired a speed dating seating object that will allow for students to be paired up and moved away from the group for a set time period, then brought back in and repaired for the next conversation. I’ve not seen it yet, but it definitely sounds like a great repurposing of a scripted Main Grid object for education on the Teen Grid.

I will post some pictures, screenshots and maybe a few video clips of these lessons as we move through them over the next six weeks. I was told last week that we may have our host family pairings this next week. That should allow for communication to start flowing between the host families and their visiting students.

April 8^th is quickly approaching, and everyone is getting excited (and nervous) about our trip to Kyoto.

New Skoolaborate Map – Rezoning

The master plan for the Skoolaborate project chain of islands is complete. Westley Field presented this at last week’s Skoolaborate Partner’s Meeting.

As explained in the videos below, the islands are subdivided into wedge zones; Education, Culture, Social Action and Living spaces radiating out from the center island (that island houses the tutorial towers). This functional design will be more manageable as the project takes in more partners and expands outward from our current 13 islands. Four of these islands are open space sims, and are currently water.

The arrows are walkways that are on the borders of all of the islands and can be used to easily navigate around the islands. Kiosks are being put up around the island with this map and teleporters for getting around. We had a little impromptu boat race the other night in one of these open space bays. We had some time on our hands while the Linden Concierge did some repairs.

We had an ‘oops moment’ when the ownership of a parcel was transferred for the Forensic project, reducing the square meters of the other parcels on the island (thus reducing the prim counts on the others). A large contract build in the center of that island suddenly lost half its prims, leaving it a mix mash of random prims. To their credit, Linden Lab’s Concierge was quick to respond to a ticket and rolled this island back inside of two hours from when it happened.

We were on Friday night removing builds from the pre-move PacRimX islands and planning our relocation and rebuild of projects. The big one that needs to move is the Forensics project. Dave Menshew, Teacher at Enochs High and creator of this virtual forensics project, was not excited about tearing down everything that was built over this past summer for the Ezra Keats Pan Pacific Project. I know the feeling, as I experienced it the first time we redesigned and rebuilt the old PacRimX islands. But as one of the students that was online with us Friday night said, “It’s the building that’s so much fun”. I’ll post some pictures once we get the new Forensics area built and back online.

Skoolaborate Growth – New Videos

The Skoolaborate project had a monthly meeting this past week to discuss the new layout of the Skoolaborate islands and how we are moving forward as we continue to grow (now approaching 30 schools/districts from around the globe. It is amazing to see the growth of this project over the past year. Westley Field (Australia) and Chris Flesuras (Japan) have been putting in extraordinary efforts for this project, and those efforts are paying off.

Chris recently released a two part video on the Jidaimatsuri event that was held back in December. Here are links to both of his videos; Jidaimatsuri Part 1 and Part 2. I believe he is looking at reposting these to another service soon that can accommodate videos longer than 10 mins (Yahoo’s current limit).

These are both excellent videos that cover the range of activities (and logistics) that were involved in this event. Because this event was hosted by the Kyoto students, their involvement started much earlier than those at Modesto City Schools, and ran for a much longer period. This video is great for other educators to see what went into the planning and execution of this event, and for our own students to see what was going on over in Japan prior to their participation in this event.

Virtual word technologies are still in their early years. This technology is really starting to produce results for bridging distances and engaging students. Many teachers still do not even know what this technology is, or even how to get started with using it. For the few that are attracted to this technology, many either don’t have the resources to get a project off the ground, nor do they have the support of their administrators to spend the time necessary to be successful. Very few will invest the personal time needed at this time to bring this technology to their students in a successful way.

A project like Skoolaborate pulls together like minded educators from around the globe that are excited about the technology and delivers the resources and experiences many teachers frankly just don’t have access to, especially in these times of tightening budgets. Merging our project into the Skoolaborate family was the best decision we could have made, and our students are all the richer for the partnership. I must also be thankful for the support my district gives for continuing our involvement with this type of cutting edge project.

Christmas in January

We tried to coordinate a Christmas gift exchange between the Kyoto and Modesto students before the holidays. Because of the holiday break and getting started late here in the US, we did not get all our gifts together and shipped until just after Christmas. So we had a late Christmas party and gift exchange over video conference yesterday for the students to exchange gifts and introduce themselves to each other.

The students were drawn by raffle ticket to pick a gift and open it with a partner on the other side of the video link. Each gift had a note card with a greetings and contact information. The Modesto student would call out the name of the Kyoto student that had sent the gift and they would come to the front of the seats to watch their gift being opened.

This event had a loose agenda and it went really well as the students worked through the exchange and opening of their gifts. Students on both sides were very expressive and asked lots of questions about what some of the gifts were. Each Modesto student would attempt to pronounce the Japanese names, in almost every instance the student would jump up and come to the front on the first try.

The gift cards were passed around so everyone could see what was written on them. The Kyoto students did a great job writing them out in English and including pictures, stickers, and other flourishes that added to the greeting and invitation to exchange emails (SL names and email addresses were on the back of the cards).

After the gift exchange finished up, the Kyoto students demonstrated a popular game that is played during the New Year’s in Japan. It’s a variation on the ‘Pin the tail on the Donkey’ game played here in the states.

A Japanese student explained the rules and how it worked from a prepared script.

A popular cartoon character or person has their facial features removed (eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc.) and then the player must place these items back on the face while blindfolded. While not all of the Modesto students recognized Pikachu (the lead character from Pokemon), everyone knew immediately who the second animated character was.

After a few rounds of this game the Kyoto students sang a children’s fairy tale song for the New Year to the Modesto students. Like the Modesto students, not all of the Kyoto students were willing participants in the singing. These students are more alike than they are different. The only thing holding them back is the language barrier, which I suspect will be lessening as the trip approaches.

Since a number of the students from Modesto have been in the multimedia program for the past few years, we have our own camera crew for all of these events.

The video conference feed and the activities in this room were both recorded. By the time we get back from our trip in April we will have enough video to put together a great video documentary of this trip for all of the students involved. This is a great bunch of students and we should have a wonderful experience on this exchange. This year will be the first full cycle including students going to both host countries (these same Kyoto students will be coming to Modesto this summer for summer school). We’ll continue to update this site throughout this exchange.

The next phase of this exchange will be the Kyoto students giving basic Japanese lessons to the Modesto students online in Second Life. We will be building an area where a few Kyoto students can come online and give half hour classes to a group of Modesto students. We’re going to start it up in a few weeks and have at least one session a week until our trip in April. Some basic survival Japanese might come in handy on our trip to Japan.

One girl’s parents came and saw that we only had cupcakes and drinks for the students and ran out and bought pizzas for all the kids. That was an awesome treat for the students (what teenager is going to turn down hot steamy pizza on a rainy day). I’ve never seen that many pizzas disappear so quickly.  It was a fun time for all involved, and a nice treat to have Christmas in January.

Spring Break Modesto to Kyoto Student Exchange Trip

Anyone who frequents this site has noticed that I’ve been away for a bit, not too many updates these days. The first big delay was our move from an independent project to our merger with Skoolaborate. This took place when school came back into session back in August. Getting all the new procedures in place and getting all the new students (over 200 this year) online was a challenge. This past month most of my free time has been spent trying to get the exchange trips from Modesto to Kyoto reestablished.

Back in 2001 after the terrorist attacks on the U.S. trips from Modesto to Kyoto ceased due to safety concerns of parents. The Japanese also terminated all travel to the states for a few years after those attacks. However, several years later Kyoto Gakuen started to send students to the U.S. again. Now that we are in the second year of the PacRimX Project, demand from both Kyoto Gakuen and the parents of students here in Modesto have demanded that we start the exchanges back up for Modesto students to travel to Japan.

In April, during Spring Break, I will be taking Modesto 20 students to Kyoto for an eight day exchange trip. School starts up in April in Kyoto and we will be there for the first day of the new school year. A teacher from one of our high schools will be the other chaperone for this trip. Most of the students that have signed up are involved in the PacRimX Project. A few are students who hosted Kyoto students this past summer or back in October. They are specifically asking for placement of their students with those that they hosted.

Over the past month I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many area families who have hosted Kyoto students over the years. In almost all cases there have been long term bonds formed between these families. Many bring students back for longer visits over the summer, others send their children to Japan, and almost every single family maintains a close relationship over phone and through the Internet.

Week before last a large box arrived from Kyoto filled with small Christmas gifts. They are all neatly wrapped in Japanese paper with little notes attached. These are intended for a gift exchange between the Modesto students signed up for this exchange and their Kyoto counterparts. Today and tomorrow I have parents and students dropping off small wrapped gifts that will be shipped to Kyoto. Because we only recently got our list of students established, our gift exchange will have to wait until January. The students will draw presents and open them up via a live video conference link between our schools. This will also serve as the first formal introduction between the exchange students from Modesto and the Kyoto students we will be visiting.

The really great part is that this summer many of these same Kyoto students will be coming to Modesto for four weeks to attend a multimedia summer school class in Modesto. This means that most of these students will get to meet in person twice in one year, once in Kyoto and then again this summer in Modesto.

We have a private website that has already gone online for this Spring Break exchange. All parents and students have accounts to access it. We are making this our primary source of communication running up to this trip. I’ve got a Wiki started with information about the places we will visit, customs, etiquette and what to expect. Each of the students will be given rights to have a blog on this site. During the trip students will be able to post updates and pictures for people back home, and parents can post replies to their son or daughter’s blog. I’m sure we will accumulate a lot of video and stills from this trip, and I will make certain that we post a few albums on Flickr with the best of these pictures.

We had wanted to do this first exchange back to Kyoto last year, but the changes in passports and other issues prevented it from happening last year. With the budget crisis out here in California right now, it almost didn’t happen again. I am so thankful to the supportive parents, our sister school in Kyoto, and our school board here in Modesto for seeing the value of this trip and moving it forward so we can get this fine tradition reestablished. I’ve met every one of the students that are signed up for this exchange, and have worked with many of them over the past two years in the PacRimX Project. I am thankful for the honor of being allowed to lead this group of students to Kyoto. It will be a trip of a lifetime that is already inspiring some of them to learn Japanese culture, traditions and some of the language.

Follow along here at this blog for updated info and a flood of firsthand accounts and photos after we return in April. It’s going to be a great experience for all involved!

Festival of Ages – Successful Event

A few weeks back we had our second annual Jidai Matsuri (Festival of Ages). Here’s a link to last year’s event. This year was a lot different than last year’s because the students were much more involved (I think it was because they somewhat knew what to expect, and what was expected of them) and interactive.

During this event the Japanese students build replicas of area temples from Kyoto, and create clothing for their avatars that is historically accurate to the time period of their temple. They break up into groups and the American students come and visit their buildings and interview them with a list of predetermined questions.

Here are a few pictures from this year’s event:

A few of the temples for the Festival of Ages

A Japanese student at her building ready for questions

Modesto students descending on the event

A Modesto student conducting his interview of a Kyoto student

This year we had an open video conference link up so that the students could communicate face-to-face. During the event there were not a lot of conversations going on, but as students started finishing there were groups of students forming on both sides of the link to talk. One pair of Kyoto girls sang a few songs for the Modesto students. After they applauded, the girls stated “You’re turn now!”. The assembled Modesto guys stumbled through a rendition of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer for the Kyoto Girls.

Kyoto girls deciding on a Christmas song to sing for the Modesto students

Getting crowded in front of the Polycom video conference unit

I had to leave for another appointment, but the teacher who ran this lab that participated in this event said the video conference stayed open for over an hour with active participation from both sides of the camera. Many of these students will be traveling to Kyoto this Spring Break to meet their counterparts in this project. An exchange has existed for 18 years now. The flow of students stopped after the 9/11 attacks, with the Japanese starting theirs back up a few years back. This Spring Break will mark the first exchange from Modesto to Kyoto in eight years.

Kicking off a New Year and New Projects

Well, here we are about to embark on a new year. The transition from our old PacRimX Islands to the Skoolaborate project was anything but smooth. This transition started in August. The only remaining issue I have is that I’ve still not received an updated invoice from Linden Lab for this year’s maintenance on our islands that we just transferred to Skoolaborate.

All student accounts have now been created for the new school year. The teacher accounts have been requested and should be online in the next few days, they are already online with their transferred avatars. And now we have our first two events planned with Kyoto.

The first event will be the Jidai Matsuri (Festival of Ages). Here’s a link to last year’s event. We are tentatively scheduling this year’s event for December 4^th. It’s a good thing that the Kyoto students are doing all the building for this, as the Modesto students will just be starting to learn how to build over the next month. We will again be using the “Creating Your World” book as the textbook this year. It worked really well for our summer school classes.

The Modesto City Schools Kyoto Exchange planned for Spring Break ‘09 is going to the School Board next week. Once we have approval we will recruit 20 students for this exchange from three of our high schools here in Modesto. This will be the first exchange of Modesto students to Kyoto since the September 11, 2001 attacks. We will also have a waiting list in case any students can’t go. We are planning on a gift exchange between Modesto exchange students and their host families via video conference on December 18^th.

Now that we have our students online they will benefit from the exposure to all of the other schools from around the world involved with the Skoolaborate project. We will likely be joining in on their planned events as well. This will be an exciting year. We have a total of 144 Modesto students and three teachers involved in this project this year. I expect the Skoolaborate project to really take hold and hit a stride in the next six months. See a recent post on the Skoolaborate blog about our recent mergers.