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Students use Skype to talk about Ike

By Hayley Kappes
Correspondent
Published September 13, 2009

GALVESTON — On a weekend when counting stories of Hurricane Ike is on every islander’s mind, a group of fourth-grade students at Rosenberg Elementary got a chance to broadcast theirs to North Texas.

Friday, the students used Skype, software that enables phone calls and video chat through the Internet, to interact with students at Sam Rayburn Elementary in Ivanhoe, near the Texas/Oklahoma border.

Kari Worsham, librarian at Rosenberg, uses Skype to keep in touch with her mother, Kimberly Hopkins, who is a librarian in the Sam Rayburn Independent School District.

Second-grade students at Sam Rayburn were studying hurricanes in science class.

“We thought, ‘Why couldn’t we try this at school?’” Worsham asked.

Hopkins’ students e-mailed questions to the Rosenberg fourth-graders regarding their Ike experience.

Some of the questions included how high the storm surge was, details about the weather patterns and how each student was affected after the storm.

They studied photos of destruction on the island.

“It helps put hurricanes in a real world context for the children,” Worsham said.

Worsham said some of the students had used Skype before to communicate with out-of-town relatives.

The video conference between the two schools was projected onto a widescreen in Rosenberg’s library.

Several fourth-grade classes and teachers came in to watch the exchange, which took place during last period Friday afternoon.

“I was excited when I heard the students were doing this,” Principal Sharon Delesandri said. “I had never seen Skype before.”

The Sam Rayburn students focused their questions on the Rosenberg students’ perspective of the hurricane, rather than scientific nature of hurricanes in general.

“(The sky) was greenish-brown when the hurricane came through, lots of lightning and the wind was loud,” Jonae Whitaker said in response to a question about how the sky looked during Ike.

Whitaker was the only student of the six who remained on the island with her family during the storm.

One student asked how long it took for grass and other plants to turn green again.

Another questioned if any of the students’ pets had died because of the storm, and where the students evacuated.

Worsham said this is the first time she has experimented with Skype as a classroom tool, and she wants to continue its use for students.

Toward the end of class, the Rosenberg students turned the table on the Sam Rayburn students, by asking if they have hurricanes in North Texas.

“No hurricanes,” the students said. “Just tornadoes.”