------------------------------ KIDPLAN SITEK935 - 2 June 1993 ------------------------------ GET KIDPLAN SITEK93R for complete listing of available KIDS-93 SITE Report files. Send revisions, updates, or suggestions to Mark Hunnibell at: Internet: mark@kids.duq.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this file: ** Australia - Melbourne ** Canada - Toronto Ontario ** New Zealand - Wellington UK - London ** USA - Roanoke Texas ** USA - Rockville Maryland ** Reports not yet available. UK - London ----------- Date: 16 May 1993 16:44:00 -0300 (BST) From: MIKE BURLEIGH Subject: Site Report from the UK From OLDFIELD HOUSE SCHOOL: Richmond-on-Thames: UK Dear KIDLINK people, The weeks leading up to the May '93 event were exceptionally busy as we were involved with NSF and University College London in arranging, with three schools in America a presentation to launch the use of the Internet for video-conferencing. Given support from companies here in the UK we hope to be able to provide more information about this very exciting and relatively low cost technology. Here in the UK we had prepared for the May 6,7,8th event by holding a training session in the previous week and as a result classes from three schools attended on the 7th. Whilst the children and staff busily keyed in messages we made several journeys onto irc (not always meeting up with KIDLINK people) but the children did make some realtime exchanges. A local amateur radio enthusiast demonstrated this technology on Thursday to the fascination of the Oldfield House kids Apologies to the person in Norway who sent us a lovely fax message because when we came to reply we discovered that the school had taken away their 'prize' and we had no number to send to! We sent messages to 'Response' and also packaged messages from the three schools on KIDPROJ to launch a 'Town Twinning Project'. A sequence of events led up to this. The school hosted a visitor from Richmond Virginia who in turn met the Mayor of Richmond-on-Thames when she visited our twin town. Thanks to Sally Laughon we made contact with Richmond Virginia education networkers and mail is now being exchanged between twinned schools. Officials in local government were impressed with our arrangements and ensured that the May event was included in two Richmond newspapers. The event was monitored at Oldfield and at Patti Weeg's school in Maryland by educationalists therefore we set up our own channel on the kidlink irc server and hopefully proved through our focussed discussions the virtues of KIDLINK as a learning environment. Perhaps we were successful as the children are now researching in preparation for an 'on-line' map reading and history lesson. Perhaps Saturday proved to the most interesting in that children brought their