Video conference connects students
By JO CIAVAGLIA
Bucks County Courier Times

Not many first-graders attend college or visit a Mexican school. Even fewer get the chance to do both the same day.

Which explains why Karen Gibbon bubbled with excitement Friday morning.

"This is the most unique field trip I've ever had an opportunity to do," said Gibbon, a teacher at Hope Lutheran Christian grade school in Bristol Township.

Few would argue otherwise. Her first-graders visited Chestnut Hill College, where they spent an hour swapping science lessons and questions with elementary school students in Mexico City.

"I don't know many adults that get a chance to work with videoconferencing," Gibbon said.

The real time lesson was made possible through a live videoconference arranged by Global Education Motivators [GEM], which is headquartered at the Philadelphia college. GEM is a nonprofit group associated with the United Nations Department of Public Information.

GEM contacted the school with the invitation to have first-graders there and students at Colegio Carol Baur School in Mexico City prepare and present experiments on the same science units, Gibbon said.

The teacher jumped at the opportunity to turn a science lesson on magnets into a lifetime memory in social studies and international relations.

"There is so much more in education that goes beyond textbooks," she said.

GEM typically does the videoconferencing exchanges with high school students, said Sabrina Cusimano, GEM's director of education outreach, and a Hope Lutheran graduate. Less than a handful of their sessions each year involve elementary schoolchildren.

The purpose of the exchanges is the same, though - to promote a better global awareness and understanding in young people and reverse some of the stereotypes that children might have about people from other countries, she said.

"Kids are bombarded with a lot of negative images of kids from other countries," Cusimano said.

On Friday, the first-graders were bombarded with images of kids wearing school uniforms of blue sweaters, white shirts and plaid skirts and dark slacks doing experiments with magnets.

"Are they really doing that?" Tyler Slaymaker whispered to Gibbons, as the Mexico City kids performed an experiment.

After exchanging lesson presentations, the children were able to exchange questions.

"What does your weather look like now?" Hope Lutheran's Tyler Offenback asked.

"It is sunny," a Colegio Carol Baur student replied.

"What cartoons do you watch?" Tyler's classmate Ryan Meehan asked.

"SpongeBob."

"When you grow up, what do you want to be?" Bailey Coppens wanted to know.

"A doctor."

"A teacher."

"A ballet dancer."

The same jobs that, by a show of hands, many Hope Lutheran kids wanted, too.