Students from Callisburg High School and Kesennuma Miyagi Prefectural High School presented results of their pair project (please see posting in Pair Project area of Xoops) during the October video conference. For the Callisburg students it was a long day because they had attended Japanese lessons with Hara-san and Morizuka-san during the hour prior to the video conference. (They are having a terrific time with the lessons and the JFMFMTP teachers are tremedous. More about that later in a separate posting.)



This time of year is also extremely busy for Texas high school students who are active in athletic events such as football, volleyball, cheerleading, and marching band. Our video conferences are held on Thursday evenings at 5:30 p.m. Texas time which is 7:30 a.m. Friday morning Kesennuma time. It generally works well for us, but this week we had many students obligated to participate in one of the athletic events so we had fewer in the video conference.


Callisburg is fortunate to have some excellent science teachers and Ms. Carla Taylor has volunteered to join the MTP team to help with the pair projects and bugs and soil. She is also helping with the Callisburg Middle School team. Since we are a small rural school, we often share teachers and facilities with our middle school.

We had better luck with our FreshVoice program this time but still used Skype for the audio portion. FreshVoice is an excellent program that allows us to post PowerPoint presentations on the web so it looks like a presentation on our own computers. Kesennuma High School also had PowerPoint presentation with their scientific data but they projected their program onto a screen and then pointed their web cam at the screen. That method works, but quality is much less than using FreshVoice. The FreshVoice program is provided by Kesennuma's partner, The Miyagi University of Education. They have been a tremendous resource for Callisburg High School as well. As I reported earlier, I was able to spend several hours with Dr. Shimano this past summer as he visited Kesennuma High School, and learned more about bugs in those few hours than I had learned in my entire university studies. Kesennuma is extremely fortunate to have a partnership with Miyagi University of Education and as a result, we can all benefit from their contributions to the Global Knowledge Creating Web.

The audio portion of our conference still presented some difficulty. We discovered that using the lowest cost microphone available works better than the high cost version. Actually, this is the one that came in the package with our web cam. We had fewer problems with feedback and echo after we switched to the cheap version.

We also discovered that it would be better to get online about half an hour before the confernece begins in order to work out the audio problems. Even though we had been online with our Japanese lessons just prior to begining the pair project conference, we discovered that the audio needed readjusting and that it took some time to switch from Yahoo Messenger to FreshVoice.

In general, we had an excellent conference and exchanged valuable data with our partner school.

Before closing, I wanted to mention that Callisburg High School students received 22 handwritten letters from Kesennuma High School Foreign Language Club students. The Callisburg students were extremely excited to see the personal notes written in English and were eager to respond. Within a week, Callisburg students had written 76 return letters . We received word this week via email from Kesennuma High School that they had received our replys and the students there were very excited about the exchange. The Callisburg Students also sent a couple of CDs with their favorite music which turns out to be a favorite of the Kesennuma students as well. I think strong friendships are in the making. I hope they will be as long lasting as the pen pal relationship that Kyoko Jones writes about in Japan's Educational Challenge. At least many seeds have been planted.

This has been a milestone in our journey. We are confident our relationship will continue for years. We are so grateful to JFMFMTP for this opportunity.

Tim Jones
Callisburg High School

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