We just experienced the most awesome opportunity to Video Conference with Huntsville, Alabama at 7.00am (our time) 2.30pm the day before (Alabama’s time) on Wednesday. (Thanks to the very generous people at SONY NZ - who have lent us this video conferencing equipment for a few weeks).
Even though Alabama had just had a thunderstorm pass over, the quality of the video conference was still excellent. With our questions prepared we began to interact with each other. The types of questions we asked were things like sports played, music and artists listened too, how big is your school, what do you do in your spare time after school, class sizes, subjects available, grades/years at your school, school environment and many, many more.
The things we noticed the most were the word differences and accent as well as our uniform versus Alabama’s mufti! (which is NZ speak for wearing your own clothes). Y’all was a fascinating word for us to hear.
This was such an exciting event and so easy to do. Ms H learnt quite a bit about how she would manage a video conference or even a skype call next time. She’ll post about that a bit later in the new page called Skype/Video Conferencing Tips of this blog.
We’ve decided to create a wikispace together so that we can keep in contact with our new friends in Alabama. Keep checking back here to see the links when the wikispace has been created.
