Last Friday there was great excitement as we tried, tested and experienced a first for our school: a virtual chapel service. Using Skype, our girls participated in a chapel service with the junior school boys from Trinity Grammar.
We learnt a lot from this experience:
- it helped that the Rev. Nicholls set the scene for the students and explained how it would all work. She told them that at the start they would have a minute to all wave to each other and say hello and then she would expect them to be quiet again as the service began.- singing in unison is almost impossible. When our mic picked up our singing, it blocked the singing of the boys and the accompanist, which made it very difficult to sing in unison. I need to figure out if there's a way around this. One easy solution is to organise beforehand, that each school sings alternate verses
- as each person spoke we had them facing our webcam which meant that whilst they were facing the virtual audience they were disengaging from the "real" audience behind them.This is a good reason to keep it short and next time we would also re-consider the camera positioning.
All in all it was a successful experience and next year we are looking forward to participating in many more Virtual activities such as those offered by Skype Classroom and Google+
Resources:
https://education.skype.com/
http://connectedclassrooms.withgoogle.com/
http://www.virtualexcursionsaustralia.com.au/
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