(This was cross-posted on our shared blog)
Just before Halloween Kate, my mentee, and I connected our classrooms for a cooperative project. Using the online WizIq service, we tried to share a lesson on the four basic math operations between Kate's second-grade class and my fourth-grade class. My class created math problems, in both English and Spanish, and discussed how to teach the math to the younger, but no less eager, students.
Well, the lesson did not go as smoothly as we would have hoped. While we did test run the WizIq service ahead of time, multiple problems still cropped up on the day we tried it. Kate scheduled the lesson, but we were unable to share control at the same time. Her students' work solving the problems never appeared on my Smartboard, so we couldn't quite guide her students through the problem. We also couldn't get me webcam video to appear on her board, no was the sound clear enough to really be helpful. Needless to say, the lesson did quite meet our expectations. Still, our students were very engaged by the experiment, and we look forward to try again sometime this month with another collaborative project. Have any ideas about another service where we could work together online?