Flashmeeting is already being extensively used by schools across the East of England and beyond. We have schools registered in Europe and the USA and recently East of England broadband network (E2BN) had its first Flashmeeting with China. Flashmeeting is ideal for pupils practising their language or communications skills and for joint project work in many curriculum areas bringing new opportunities for learning into the classroom.
A range of interesting public events are hosted in the E2BN server. You can view examples, such as web conferences with NASA astronauts and students involved in the International Space Station Project, discussing about living and working in an orbit, or discussions about seed germination and plant growth experiments with science projects consultants.
eTwinning is a scheme enabling schools to work with one or more schools from the 28 European Countries through Information and Communications Technology (ICT). It is a simple and straightforward way of finding partner schools and working on a range of exciting curriculum projects. eTwinning is the main action of the European Union's eLearning programme. As part of the project, the European Schoolnet, the Centre for New Media and E2BN agreed to run a free pilot project using FM for six months during 2006, with 24 eTwinning schools and 6 EU Central Support Staff. Six schools had used the tool on a regular basis in their 'eTwinning', participating in 10 conferences each. Interestingly, as of February 2007 there are now 92 'eTwinning' schools registered as users of Flashmeeting from 18 different EU countries.
Children's views on FM use:
"It was great to talk live to pupils from the school in Spain. We get to speak with kids we would not otherwise meet. We are different yet the same!"
"I can learn how they say some words ….. It's great to learn how to say words in another language"
"We sang Christmas Carols to each other. We sang in French and their school sang in English. It was hard but real fun. I wish we could do more of this linking with kids in other countries"
For more For more information, please contact:
John Warwick
University of Hertfordshire
Saint Luke School
