January 2008 — Features
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Face Time
"One of the problems with social networking sites is, you go there, get all excited, poke around, add your friends, and then never come back again," Lim says, "unless you have a compelling reason to do so. The compelling reason on the PCATP site is Read Around the Planet."
Read Around the Planet returns on Feb. 25 and runs through March 4. TWICE provides the registration tool, matches classrooms with partners, and provides support documents. Participating classrooms are responsible for their own video connection and developing their own reading activities for the event.
"The Collaborations Around the Planet network is going to help us to grow our programs even more," says Glaser. "We've created this niche of teachers partnering with other teachers to use the technology to further the educational mission. We've started to build social relationships among classrooms. We expect those relationships to grow not only in quantity, but quality."
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Looking Ahead
If the student video-collaboration statistics from Texas' Region 12 are any indication, districts are already deep into an exploration of the potential of videoconferencing. Video interactions have grown significantly in the past three years, from a single project with 20 classrooms participating in the 2003-2004 school year to more than 500 connections among numerous projects serving 15,000 students during the 2006-2007 school year.
And yet this is the infancy of videoconferencing in K-12. Educators in techsavvy districts with the right resources are using the technology mostly for project collaboration. But as the technology proliferates and evolves—probably outside the classroom, Shuck says—videoconferencing is all but destined to emerge in a genuine social networking context.
A case in point: Paltalk, an internet chat service that is taking the bold step of offering a truly video-based social networking site. "It takes social networking to the next obvious level," Paltalk President Joel Smernoff told CNet.com last year. "Not just photos and video, but being able to chat live and reach out in a more personal way."
Paltalk is probably the first company to introduce voice/audio components to instant messaging. The site employs patented speech, conferencing, and VoIP to create multichannel chat rooms that support thousands of users at once.
