40 Year 9 boys, one teacher dressed as a chicken armed with 20 netbooks and a world cup challenge to complete a presentation to show to a global audience in just 3 hours is all part of a normal day at Saltash.net community school.
These 14 year old boys were first thrown in the deep end when they entered the classroom to famous world cup songs and were immediately put into small groups. Each group then came up to draw a country from the world cup pool. Once they had their country they then had just a few hours to come up with a presentation that they would share with the rest of the world in the afternoon via twitcam – they would also field questions from educators and students from around the world.
The boys quickly decided to create their own short videos including lots of information about the country they had selected at random. They had to research about this country and present the information. They also created their own chants or songs using soundation. (If you are not sure what this is check out this post: http://bit.ly/d7adCZ)
They were hugely competitive and this added a certain x factor to their group work as there was lots of friendly rivalry in particular with the football teams too. At the end of the morning they then had to prepare to broadcast their presentations to a global audience – we chose to do this via twitcam and so it also enabled the audience to interact with us and ask questions as well as giving immediate feedback.
This was a fantastic experience for the boys, we had teachers and students tuning in to watch their presentations from France, to USA to Singapore. Actually we were even joined by students and teachers in England (@davidrogers), you can see the archived twitcam by visiting:
You can also view the students videos here but also on youtube, I will post them when I get chance to upload them. I had an absolutely awesome time and we received some great feedback on the students work. This has to be what teaching is all about! Have you had a similar experience recently? Have you use twitcam for this type of purpose? I would love to hear what you are doing.