Aug 09 2008
G’day to Perth, Boston and Manila from Hawkesdale!
Good morning to Geoff Kaye, a contact with the DiscoverE classroom in WA… and good evening to Lorraine Leo of Boston USA …. and good morning to Rox Cosico from Manila in the Phillipines. Today three countries from four distinct areas connected in one virtual classroom!!! They were Boston, USA, Manila, Phillipines and Hawkesdale and Perth, Australia.
How exciting is this!!! to actually meet someone who teaches a class of a similar age group at the same time that I do and speaks good English as well ……. and comes from Asia. The Phillipines class consisted of 43 boys of ages 12 to 13. Rox emailed us and said that “The Philippines have English as their second language, Tagalog or Filipino is their primary language, all my students know how to speak English, but the accent that they know are American or Filipino English so they might not be able to pick up immediately some of the British or Australian accent. We would love to hear your voices from Australia.” My class consisted of 16 students from year 7, Hawkesdale, Australia
After some technical difficulties (from the Manila end), and just as our morning recess bell was about to go, we connected fully with audio and video on all but the Manila front. Our students had prepared a powerpoint presentation that showed features of our school. Each year 7 student spoke to a slide and explained the nature of the image.
Our students were fascinated with the fact that it was an all boys school. When queried why, the response was that it was an elite school. The Phillipine students came online asking us to slow down our speech when relating to non-English speaking people. However, excitement was paramount on both sides of the classroom and another journey and steep learning curve begins!!
Thank you Lorraine for organising this for us!! And some suggestions from Lorraine:-
“I remind my students that they are ambassadors representing their class, school, state, country, continent and hemisphere ….This is especially helpful when doing a recording since it’s sort of like ‘live t.v.’
It was fun to see the smiles from the kids in Hawksdale when they realized that the students in Claret were in the audience! Students love working with students……no matter what continent they are on.”
