ejourneys

What a great day we had today! Even though we have used skype briefly with classes and a school from NZ, and our grade 5 teacher and our LOTE teacher use it,  our first big trial in the classroom for me came today when we introduced our classes to students in Korea.Each class was as nervous as the other but some students were introduced, took the microphone and asked each other about their schools, homes and countries. We recorded the conversation with powergramo and the quality of the audio was superb. I am about to edit the 40 minute conversation and convert to an mp3 file and put it up on this blog (if I can get the technology to work) in the next few days.Here are the comments from one of our year 7 students who was in the audience:-Today I learnt that Korean students  live in the school dormitories,wake up at 7:00 and school starts at 8:00 and finishes at 5:00. There school is a scientific school. There age is around 14 to 18 years old. They only watch television at lunchtime for an hour, if they are lucky. Korean people are not good swimmers because there are not many swimming pools around.Korea is the size of Victoria and Australia holds 25 million people and Korea holds 60 million. The students want to be university students. One of the Korean students thinks one of our girls is cute.  When we were skyping them it was -6 degrees and snowing, and in Australia it was 32 degrees. In Korea they can drive when they’re 20 and in Australia we can drive at 18.In Korea they live in apartments. There English was pretty good. I liked it because I could learn about different things in different schools and countries. But not only we could learn about Korea but we can learn about our own students. We will have a go at skyping each other each day this week, but with different classes. Students no longer need to learn about other countries from textbooks but directly from students in their own countries.