Over the last few weeks we have been having fun in class exploring the world through the eyes of children in Kathy Rice’s class in British Columbia, Canada and today, Brian Crosby’s class in Spark, Nevada, USA. These learning experiences have come to us through Sylvia Tolisano‘s Around the World with 80 Schools Project. The idea is that participants enter their class details on a wiki and then link up whenever they want via Skype. The calls are only supposed to be five to ten minutes long but we tend to go longer as we share our music, clothing, weather, pets, population, sports. Learning is messy and things never go quite to plan.

So far we have visited 4% of the globe with our class blog comments and Skype calls. I wonder what percentage we will have by the end of the school year.

Here is where Sylvia’s students have been so far!

Before the event we have a bit of a look around on Google Earth to fly between New Zealand and the place we are going to connect with.

Then we brainstorm anything we know about the country that we are going to connect with. Before our Skype call- not a lot!

We then designed fairly open ended questions and allot people to ask the questions.

I used the Time Scroller widget to get our timing right and after a bit of negotiation as to a time the works we are underway.

I have Call Recorder set up auto record the call which I have edited in iMovie to highlight the interesting bits.

As a great extra to our call to Kathy Price’s class in British Columbia we were able to contribute to a Voicethread they had made to show us exactly how cold it was! Have a look- it’s quite incredible.

Thanks Sylvia. We’re going to have fun with this- Argentina here we come!

We now know what a toque is and know a lot more about being a Canadian!