Saturday, August 30, 2008

NORT2H Highlights for August 2008

Lorain City Schools Launch Mandarin Chinese over IVC:
Students from Lorain Southview and Admiral King High Schools kicked off their first of daily connections to the Confucius Institute in Kansas to learn Mandarin Chinese. Through a partnership with the Greenbush ESC in Kansas the NORT2H staff was able to bring Lorain and the Confucius institute together to make this class offering possible. Dave Miller and I sat in on the first class and was impressed with the Jessie the Kansas teacher and how the students quickly adapted to the video environment. I look forward to checking in on the classes in the near future.

You got VOD?
The first project of the NORT2H consortium was Video On Demand (VOD). This was an exciting project for our group as teachers, tech coordinators, media specialists and administrators tried out Discovery Learning, Safari Montage and CCC on Demand. When the dust was cleared and the votes tallied it was Safari Montage that scored the highest. Over the summer our server was installed and we are now adding schools and providing teacher trainings. Currently we have the Avon, Fairview, Keystone, Lorain County JVS running and have been provind schools demo's to further evaulate the project. NORT2H members schools get discounted rates on content packages, teacher training, and local technical support.

Podcasts start September 8th:
The NORT2H staff plans to start their podcast season Monday September 8th. We were hoping to run these our of our new studio, but due to some schedule conflicts and issues with construction we can not wait for the studio to be complete. We will continue using Adobe Visual Communicator to create our Video's and plan to post them again on www.Podomatic.com. Look for these to improve over time.

PageCast updates stay current throughout the summer:
The NORT2H staff have been updating our pagecast on Pageflakes all summer! The categories remain the same provding teachers and coordinators groups of content provider updates, professional development, careers, special programs and teacher collaborations. Have an IVC event that you would like to advertise on our pagecast? Send Paul Hieronymus an email at Hieronymus@esclc.org

Testing 1 2 3... Test:
The NORT2H test codec is back online and availible for you to dial in. We are running a DVD of previous years IVC connections for sites to get audio and video. Feel free to dial in at any time to 208.108.92.151.