Sunday, December 5, 2010

11/29

Video teaching is the worst thing every invented! The worst! I can promise you this. My friend Sarah and I work together for our video conference. They paired up all the primary English assistants to work together on the video conference. Each group has a middle school out in the middle of rural France. The first class we have is probably the equivalent of 7th grade and they think they are so cool. They think they are too cool to talk in English and participate, and that they have the ability to talk whenever they want to. Get this, there is an actual teacher in the room and she is no help. I’m telling you guys it the most frustrating experience. The kids are constantly talking, they don’t listen to me or Sarah, and their actual teacher won’t even try and get them to listen, she is too busy worrying about the clicker (control that operates the TV).  So here is a little background on the actual conference set-up, it’s like a fancy skype system. On our TV screen we have a picture of the whole class and a picture of me and Sarah. So this teacher that they have finds it necessary to hold the clicker the whole time and when every a child is answering a question she feels it necessary to zoom in directly on the child’s face.  Now you may think this is helpful to us but it’s NOT. Because the class is so noisy and she won’t stop them, we find it difficult to see who the actual culprits are, not to mention she goes so fast with the clicker from one kids face to another, it makes me sea sick. It’s the most annoying thing in the world, constantly going left to right or up and down. I would never recommend this for any school system anywhere.

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