Snakes Gone Wild
May 16, 2008
One of our elementary schools connected with Highland HS in ESC Region 14 for their “Snakes Gone Wild” program. This program is one of Tommy B.’s RUS grant schools’ projects that he required for all sites receiving equipment. This is also the type of program featured in the KC3 program sponsored by Tandberg and CILC.
The program was a 30 minute connection. The first 20 minutes of the program consisted of the high school students showing ppt slides and videos to tell about the World-Famous Rattlesnake Round-up. I thought it was interesting to learn about the history of the round-up. Then there was some time for our students to ask questions at the end.
Our elementary students were curious about…
- How many rattlesnakes are born in a year? We don’t really know!
- How many snakes are brought to the Round-Up each year? 65,000 pounds! YIKES!
- What do you do if you are bitten and there is no anti-venom? Call 911 and get to the hospital.
- How big can a rattlesnake grow? 6′9″ is the largest on record. Again…YIKES!!
- How do they catch rattlesnakes? With a snake catcher
This is a direction that we will see more high schools venture into with curriculum videoconferencing. The powerpoint and the video shown during the program were good quality. They even had video of skinning snakes and milking snakes that were shot at the Round-Up.
What I have seen in videoconferencing programming is that once the visuals are high-quality, then the next stage is to increase the interaction and teaching quality in the programming. (Remember, I blogged about Rusty’s transformation from presenter to teacher.) Think about where the learning takes place…so many times we see the learning residing only with the site that has prepared the “presentation”. How can we create an effective learning experience for the students who did not have the hands-on experience of being at the Round-up? Thinking about teaching instead of just presenting will make this type programming the best of both worlds for both the creating/presenting site and for the connecting/learning site.
Kudos to Tommy B. and Highland High School! Thank you for sharing!
Posted in Collaborative Projects
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Hmm. Have you seen Jan Zanetis’ pyramid of types of videoconferences? I’m thinking that maybe there is also a pyramid for the type of interaction as well. I’m hoping this summer to analyze the RAP survey where everyone described the interaction. I think a presentation followed by Q&A would be one of the beginning levels, with dialogue and problem solving like MQ at the higher levels. What do you think? Does Bloom’s taxonomy fit in here somewhere too?