Join us Monday at 9:30 AM Pacific time (GMT-8) for a live discussion involving room 162 and a class from Greece as we discuss the extreme sport practiced by the “land divers” of Vanuatu.
Prior to our Skype call, we conducted a survey of students in class and asked them several questions ablout sports. Here are their answers:
We will be participating in a live Ukulele Day celebration with our old friends in Dunedin, New Zealand on Thursday, February 2nd. Students will be backchanneling it live using the interface below. Join in the conversation! All comments are moderated before they appear.
Last week we had a chance to Skype with our old friends the Scoopers in Dunedin, New Zealand. We are sending each other travel bugs. It will be great fun tracking them together as they make their way (finger’s crossed!) across the Pacific. They got a chance to show us “our” bug – a very cute bee. They named the bug that we are sending them T.O.B.I. Both bugs are now in caches awaiting a couple of geocachers to find them and get them moving.
Our geocaching project has been fun this year. We have had a few ups and a few downs. One of our bugs made it to the Huzzahnians in Canada, but another headed that way to the Ripplers disappeared from the first cache we placed it in, never to be seen again. 
One of our first bugs, Kallista Jake has travelled over 40,000 miles and is currently in Australia, just a few miles from Kallista Primary School. Another bug is headed to our friends in Ms. Ratzels class in Kansas. It is making progress too. We even tried to send the Scoopers a bug back in September, but that is still in the hands of a geocacher in Fresno.
We look forward to Skyping again with the Scoopers after testing in a couple of weeks!
Listening while Dr. Lanka answered our questions
On Monday this week we had a Skype call with Dr. Sunita Lanka about ancient India. She is a professor of English at Hartnell College. Students came up with several questions for her and she was kind enough to answer them all in our 30 minute chat.
Questions covered not only ancient India, the Aryans, Vedas, and geography, but also contemporary India. She answered questions about food, Hinduism, cultural festivals and the caste system.
We had three students work the backchannel while we Skyped and another took photos. Our backchannel transcript turned out very interesting thanks to Clint, Amy, and Dusty. You can see the entire backchannel by visiting here, or check out the portion of it below.
Here is some of what we learned:
I learned that Vishnu has many forms – Edgar
I found out that India has had major disasters before Japan’s earthquake. They had a tsunami in 2004. – Chermelle
I learned that it i ok to marry someone out of your caste. – Andrea
Indians like spicy foods. – Dusty
I now know that Hindu girls wear a red dot on their forehead to indicate that they are Hindu, but don’t wear it if their husband died. – Vanessa
Flickr/room162
Twitter/room162
YouTube/dubmiller
Tumblr/room162
Google+/John Miller
