Ms. Misty Martin, a Spanish teacher at Tates Creek High School, was looking for a way to help her advanced students communicate with native Spanish speakers, and use some technology in her classes. The solution was videoconferencing! Thanks to Ms. Ida Conn and her ESL students at Leestown Middle School, a videoconference was set up between Ms. Martin's class at TCHS and Ms. Conn's class at LMS. Ms. Martin's students prepared in advance by creating questions they had about life and customs in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries and then took turns interviewing the ESL students. Using an LCD projector at both locations helped to involve all the students in both classrooms. It was a fun and informative experience. Some of the high school girls weren't quite ready when the middle school boys asked them out on dates, but the girls handled the situation well and everyone learned a lot.

The equipment for the videoconferencing has been in use for several years for distance-learning between several high schools in the district, but is now available for all schools to use. If you would like to set up a videoconference with other classes in the district, feel free to contact Jeff Jones (jjones@fayette.k12.ky.us) or Stephen Holthaus (sholthau@fayette.k12.ky.us) for more details.