Capstone Project Model Project Coordinator: Caroline Cerveny, SSJ-TOSF Project Team Members:
Adrian Brown, Catholic Education Commission, Sydney, Australia
Anthony Munro, Project Officer: eLearning in Religious Education, Catholic Education Office, Sydney
The Sydney faculty involved in the project are: Jenny Foldes, REC from All Saints Catholic Boys College, Liverpool. She is a Religion and Visual Arts teacher . Her students are all boys in the 9th grade level; and Moira Loader, REC, is a Religion and Mathematics teacher at Our Lady of Mercy College, Burraneer, working with all girls in the 9th grade level. The Principal, Christina Trimble, is the teacher of this Year 9 class.
Michael Geelan, Religion Faculty, Bishop Moore Catholic High School in Orlando and his junior (11th Grade) religion students, coed classroom.
Kathy Brasseaur, Religion Faculty, St. Petersburg Catholic High School and her freshman (9th Grade) religion students, coed classroom.
Project Title: Global Church Project Project Description: World Youth Day in 2008 in Sydney was a revelation for young people in far-off Australia.
The Church for which they have so much love and loyalty stood forth to
be a global community of enormous vitality and variety composed of many people, many cultures and involved in many missions. But what was most striking came in the growing awareness of the unity in this diversity: young people from so many nations, across so many parts of the world worshipping the same Jesus, holding to the same Faith and celebrating the same values. The sense of unity was reinforced by the billetting1, the activities in which they were jointly involved and the long-term friendships and connectedness that were created. 1
Many of the WYD pilgrims were given temporary homes in the homes of Sydneysiders. These were billets
Although many of these young people will travel to Madrid, they wanted to capture that sense of belonging to a Global Church in a more permanent way. An opportunity came with the inaugural Interactive Connections Conference in Orlando, Florida to reconnect with the sense of the Church as a global community. One of the projected activities was to be a collaborative effort between students from the Archdiocese of Sydney and students from the Dioceses of St Petersburg and Orlando who would work together as a demonstration of the outreach of new technologies in engaging widely dispersed communities of Faith. At the same time as student citizens of the 21st century, they were keen to respond to the Pope’s call to show how the new technologies could be used in the cause of evangelization and “to cast into the deep” (Duc et Altum) The Year of the Priest provided a timely focus for these activities for it allowed the students to show the roles and range of ministries of priests in their communities. The end result is a kaleidoscope of digital stories representing our priests in the global community. Students would collaborate on creating and sharing the stories of priests with whom they had a close association. Project Goals: For teachers and ministers of adolescents to learn how to:
interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
communicate faith effectively to national and international audiences using a variety of media and formats.
develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.
contribute to project teams to produce original works to evangelize the world around us.
Audience Description High school students, preferably Freshman, Sophomores, or Juniors. Projected Timeline
(September) Initiate project with Adrian Brown, Catholic Education Commission, Sydney, Australia contact
(September) Begin conversation with Anthony Munro, Project Officer: eLearning in Religious Education, Catholic Education Office, Sydney and faculty/principals from Our Lady of Mercy College, Burreneer and All Saints
Boys College in New South Wales, Australia
(September) Contact principals at High Schools in Orlando and St. Petersburg Diocese to see who is interested in collaborating in this project.
(September) Meet with principal and faculty of St Petersburg Catholic High School and Bishop Moore Catholic High School in Florida.
(October) Schedule MS Live meeting with students from the 4 High Schools. (The faculty met separately to arrange the agenda).
(October) Students were instructed in details of the projects.
(October) Students worked in small teams to interview priests and create their videos.
(October - January) The Global Church Ning Network provided a formal and informal space for students to meet, collaborate, and share their videos with each other.
(November) Videos brought together via Google Earth.
Technology To Be Utilized What I would like to highlight now for you are the tools (2.0 tools, software options, and equipment) that will be used for the project: SKYPE - http://www.skype.com. An Internet telephone and videophone service (local and international service) from Skype Limited, Luxembourg. After a download to your computer, calls between subscribers are free, including videophoning (one-to-one videophone service). Most calls are free. MS LIVE - http://home.live.com. This tool will allow multi-site video connections. To make sure that the connections worked (there are some technical issues to consider), IT staff members from each of the locations (Sydney, Australia, Orlando and St. Petersburg, Florida) were involved with the student teams to make sure that all went smoothly. This also involved the IT staff doing a trial run the week before the video conference meeting. A variety of web cams were used (Australia Roundtable camera). GOOGLE EARTH - http://earth.google.com Inserting video into PowerPoint was once an exciting way to show the videos that students created. Today, one can weave together a meditative story using Google Earth and student created videos from one end of the world to another. NING - http://www.ning.com . Using NING a Facebook type community was created that only allowed membership of students involved in the project and faculty to become a virtual community with one another. FACEBOOK - http://www.facebook.org. (Optional) Some students, outside of the class work became FB friends with one another. This especially happened with the
students who were present for the January INTERACTIVE CONNECTIONS conference presentation in Orlando. Some of the schools have restrictions regarding the use of FB in school. EMAIL SERVERS (varied). Varied email services were used by the staff - Verizon, Gmail, and School servers. Despite trying to resolve issues of "black listed" emails, resolution of the problem was not resolved. We then used Gmail for all staff communications during the project time. This incident is shared to highlight that there are alternative options for email if problems arise. VIDEO SOFTWARE (varied). Depending on what students had available to them, a variety of software clients were used to create the videos. Several students used MAC notebooks which has all the software needed to create a video production. Others were able to download MS Movie Maker (a free program) to their computers which allowed them to create a video. POWERPOINT. Some students chose to use PowerPoint, as this is what they have available to them. Digital Camera and Digital Video (varied). Students used equipment that was easily available to them either at the personal or school level - cell phones, digital camera/video equipment, or flip digital cameras to record either digital photographs and/or video. Computer Equipment (varied). Both Mac and PC equipment was utilized by the students. Internet Access. High band Internet access needed to be available at all locations. Those involved in this project simply used equipment and software already available. Projected Budget All expenses for this project were part of the high school IT Department budget. What is important to note is that it was not necessary to go out and purchase new equipment or software. Do you need Departmental or Administrator approval? If yes, please indicate the steps you have taken. At various steps along the way approval of Diocesan staff, school principals, and parents were needed.