SkypeCast 5-08-06

The last Skype Meeting. In which we discuss plans for the summer, another evaluation in a week.

SkypeCast 5-01-06

In which the team reflects on the classroom experiment last Thursday. Some hypotheses, redesigns and plans for future experiments are discussed.

Skypecast 4-17

Meeting in which we Brenda, Patricia, Qing and John discussed the use of GO Inquire in the classroom for instructional purposes.
Plan: 1) Teach from 9-11am on Thursday April 27, 2) Will be taught in Spanish in Alberto's class, 3) We will video tape and debrief with class after use, 4) Brenda and Patricia will work with system to plan instructional sequences.

Skypecast #6

Meeting in which there are many skype problems and much discussed. Then again what else is new.

• Brenda will be back on campus Wed Apr 25.
• Please, review Jolin's Evaluation Script and send her feedback.
• Brenda and Patricia will review reciprocal teaching literature for implementation in Summary page design.
• We reviewed new SuperDictionary functions.
• Patricia made the good point that for SuperDictionary questions, answers need to be posted, too. Can this be part of the reciprocal summary page design?
• Reviewing the Williamsburg pictures prompted Brenda to suggest that the picture pages themselves model the geo-observational skill as applied in picture taking. I will generate new teacher/student page that walks people through this process as an introduction.

Text-to-Speech

From Patricia...I tried this software that can be downloaded for free and it allows the user to cut and paste any piece of text and it will read it for you. The great thing is that it also reads Spanish. It lets you also highlight pieces of text or words in different colors, the link is http://www.readplease.com (there's a piece you have to pay for if you want, but it's very cheap, but the things I described are available for free).

Skypecast #4

Meeting summary: Explicating Theory- Observation- NOS- Metacognition- GOInquire. Review of Erin's, Patricia's and Prototype documents.

Only 1 minor technical difficulty. Skype would not hang up when calling SkypeTest. In hung the whole system. We had to reboot the whole OS. After that some intermittent audio warping.

Skypecast #3

Continued problems with setting up the conference. The first 10 to 15 minutes were kind of chaotic. Might want to skip that. Patricia discusses her Instructional Sequence and the Rationale behind it. John presents the generative SuperDictionary.

Turns out we needed to log into the same account in which the Actiontec was installed.