TWICE News and Views

Read Around the Planet connections start today! This post has final numbers and other interesting stats about this year’s project.

People Who Make It Happen

Read Around the Planet would not be successful without support from many organizations.

• TWICE, Michigan’s K12 videoconferencing organization, started this project in 2002 and continues to invest volunteer time and funding to make the project sustainable.
• This is the third year of corporate sponsorship from Polycom. This funding allowed TWICE to contract with Sue Porter to be our RAP coordinator. The project has grown so large that it isn’t sustainable without sponsorship, so we really appreciate Polycom’s support.
• The Verification Partners lay the foundation for this project in the fall with all the test calls and assistance getting buildings entered into the system and connected correctly to their coordinators. Many of them have been involved through February in helping with test calls and fixing connections.
• Building, district, and regional level coordinators and techs have worked so hard coordinating, dealing with tech problems, encouraging teachers, following up on communication problems, and generally smoothing the way for successful connections.
• And of course, the teachers who plan creative interesting presentations for their partner classes and who weather all the little glitches and quirks that can happen in classroom-to-classroom connections.

A big thank you to EVERYONE who makes this project a success!

Read Around the Planet Stats

RAP 2009 Registrations/Classrooms: 1764
Student Estimate: 53,000 students
Equipment Profiles: 1579

Countries / Registrations
Australia / 1
Costa Rica / 3
Canada / 190
United Kingdom / 23
United States / 1548

States and Provinces
New States: Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia
New Provinces: British Columbia, Ontario
Click the graph for a larger picture.

Notes on Matching

• Entries with just one time selected: 491; 142 of the English leftover requests only entered one time.
• We had too many French requests from Alberta, Canada, and not enough from other areas.
• Language matches tend NOT to be the same age/level of study because there aren’t enough of them.
• No ISDN in the leftover pile this year. ISDN seems to be finally disappearing from this project.
• This year we tweaked the algorithm so that there are NO instate or same state/province matches in the first cycle of matching. There were only 37 in state matches in the language and leftover matches (because we couldn’t get a partner any other way).

2009 Registrations by Age
Clearly elementary classes love this project, but we still have significant participation from secondary as well. (Click the graph to view it larger).

Registrations by Language
English: 1651
English as a Second Language: 15
Special Education: 11

Spanish Beginning: 15
Spanish Intermediate: 20
Spanish Advanced or Immersion: 26

French Beginning: 4
French Intermediate: 1
French Advanced or Immersion: 21

Mandarin Chinese: 11

Cree: 1
German Intermediate: 1
Japanese: 1
Latin: 3

Equipment Types
These numbers show how many sessions were scheduled using the different equipment manufacturers compared to last year’s numbers. Click the graph to see it bigger.

Other CAPspace Numbers

Friends
Friend Relationships Confirmed:  1341
Friend Relationships Pending: 1288
Have you logged in recently to update your CAPspace friendships? Go to Projects.TWICE.cc and login. Look on the home page to see if you have any friend relationships pending. If so, click the person’s head/icon and click Add Friend. Or, go to Search to find friends and add them.

Active CAPSpace Accounts: 2587

Just think of all the people you could partner with to create additional projects! Login to projects.twice.cc and check your privacy settings. If you want others to find you, check Full Access.