World Geography Skypes with the Ukraine

Our Honors World Geography students had the awesome opportunity to Skype with a group of Ukrainian students this morning!  Our teacher, Mr. Keith Forkin, is utilizing People to People International (PTPI) this semester to form a collaboration with a middle/high school in the Ukraine. Nick Burdine is a Peace Corps volunteer working in the Ukraine and has an English Club for students after school.  Through PTPI, Mr. Forkin and Mr. Burdine were connected, and the teachers are using this connection to help their classes learn more about each other's school and community.  To kick off the project, we set up a Skype session with Mr. Burdine's English Club.  At 8:30 a.m. EST, we met the Ukrainian students, where it is currently 2:30 p.m.  Despite a few technical glitches (which always seem to happen when it REALLY matters!), the students were able to introduce themselves and learn how to say "hello" and "goodbye" in Ukrainian - "Привіт" (pronounced "pree-veet") and "до побачення" (pronounced "do pobachennya"), respectively. The students will now work on videos about our school, athletics, restaurants, neighborhoods, and more that they will share with the Ukrainian students. Stay tuned for more of this exciting connection!

Introducing ourselves to the Ukrainian students

Clipchamp to the Rescue!

So this past Monday, I had two teachers that needed my assistance during the same three blocks. Teacher #1 just needed me to review using iMovie on the iPads.  Most of his students had used the iMovie app at some point, so a refresher is all they needed. Teacher #2 needed me to teach her and her students how to use ThingLink, a web app that allows you to create interactive images.  In prioritizing and trying to figue out how to be physically be in two places at once, I realized that Teacher #2 was my top priority since we were introducing a whole new tool.  Teacher #1 could probably get by with a nice little refresher video.

I love my Samsung Chromebook and wanted to use it to make a video, even though I never had made one on it yet.  Why not throw myself a challenge on a Monday morning, right?  And yes, I could have easily used  my iPad, but I just didn't want to.  So, what tool to use to video on a Chromebook?  After a quick "google" on "making videos Chromebook," I found Clipchamp.  The free Chrome app allows you to take selfie videos (using your Chromebook webcam) or to upload videos to then convert to various output formats, save, and share.  I was on a time contratint with about an hour to spare.  I decided it was worth the challenge, even on a Monday morning!

Screen shots of Clipchamp homepage and what it offers.

I thought Clipchamp was super user-friendly in making the actual video.  In less than three minutes, I had a decent review video of filming on iPad and beginning to use iMovie.  Once the video is converted to your chosen output setting, you can save the video as a download to your computer, or you can share to Google Drive, Facebook, YouTube, or Vimeo.  I decided to upload to Google Drive to share with the teacher so that he could pull it up from his Drive and share on our projector to the whole class.  Did I say it was a Monday morning?  Well, the 29MB video that I recorded seemed to take a REALLY long time (about 20 minutes) to upload to Google Drive.  Almost too long for it to even make my one hour deadline.  I re-uploaded later in the day, the same video to a separate Google Drive account, and it did not take near as long to upload (about 7-9 minutes) as it did that morning. We will always run into issues with upload times if we are competing with struggling bandwidth.  

Here is the final product with my first attempt using Clipchamp.  The content of my video could have definitely been better rehearsed, but considering my time crunch, I was very pleased, as was Teacher #1, and I will be using and promoting Clipchamp more often.