This morning Coloma Jr. High, Marcellus Middle School, New Buffalo High School, River Valley High School, Ross Beatty High School, and St. Joseph High School participated in an interview with Congressman Fred Upton. Students had prepared questions ahead of time.
The discussion covered a myriad of topics including stem cell research, global warming, illegal immigration which affects our congressional district with farms depending on migrant workers, what its like to be in a minority in congress, social security, gas prices and the likelihood of a draft coming back.
Two questions really caught my attention:
- As a high school student I’ve noticed more students who don’t value their education. What would you say to them?
- We spend a lot of time taking very long tests. Some kids are not good test takers, but they know the material. What can we do about this problem?
We used the Polycom RSS to record this session and you can watch the streaming if you wish. This will allow the schools that weren’t able to participate the ability to still benefit from the interview.
Thank you to all the coordinators and especially Congressman Fred Upton and his staff for making this another successful videoconference!
About Janine Lim
Janine Lim, PhD, currently serves as associate dean for online higher education in the School of Distance Education at Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, MI. She and her team support over 200 online courses, provide training for faculty teaching online, and work with the campus infrastructure support of online learning. Her department also provides educational technology and Moodle support for faculty and students. In addition, Janine is responsible for the faculty and courses of the Consortium of Adventist Colleges and Universities. Janine has taught over 15 unique graduate educational technology classes online numerous times over the past 15 years, with some classes attracting participants from all over the world. Her undergraduate teaching includes social media courses for communication and digital media majors. Janine has served on the board of the United States Distance Learning Association since April 2015.
Prior to her work at Andrews University, Janine coordinated distance education for 22 K12 school districts in southwest Michigan for 14 years. In that position, as one of the co-founders of TWICE, Michigan’s K12 Videoconferencing Organization, Janine has spearheaded popular international K12 videoconference projects such as Read Around the Planet and MysteryQuest. While still serving on the board of TWICE, she was instrumental in designing and implementing the CAPspace website for collaborative videoconference projects. Janine also served on a team of Michigan educational technology trainers providing a workshop called ATA Technology Academy.
Her current online learning research interests include successful teacher behaviors, quality online discussions, and student activity patterns in self-paced courses.
Videoconferencing Out on a Lim 
Nice questions; and from high schoolers, wow! I think I would have had all the smarts just to ask whatever questions my teachers told me were important back in my high school days. Those sound like some pretty thoughtful teens.
I tried watching the stream, but I believe it’s blocked here at school (we have miserable bandwidth at the moment), so I’ll just have to imagine how it went 🙂