Duration: 1:44
James Rea, DP at Russell Street School, shares how they are using Ustream to live stream their school assemblies. This enables parents who are unable to be at school to log in and see what their child is doing. They are planning for students to take charge of the process and James sees it as another opportunity to provide an authentic audience for learning.
Another way that we communicate the blogs and the learning that’s going in the classroom is at assemblies. You know, we’ve got the big screen up there, the projectors there – it’s a good quality projector, nice sound system. So we share the learning that’s going on the digital learning. You know, there’s always a digital element there that richness the videoing, the claymation. It’s a great audience for the kids, you know making what they’re doing purposeful and it promotes e-learning to the parents that come along. They can see where the tools are being used and how they’re used to enhance understanding and to increase their capability of communicating ideas. So we’ve moved from just having the audience that we have. We’re trying to go with live streaming. We’re using Ustream and that’s been enabled by having the fibre now. We have a much faster connection, which makes that more friendly and usable so at the moment it’s a new initiative. We’re just using a laptop. We set it up just using the little webcam in the laptop, login. So Ustream was really good. It’s free, simple tools. We’ll be able to set the children up and they’ll be in charge of it. It’s getting the video quality. At the moment I want to move beyond the web camera and the sound quality. I want it to be directional. It’s another way of sharing what’s going on in our school and for those parents that can’t get away, letting them just quickly login for five minutes, see what their child’s doing.