Good Practice - Case Study

Heathlands School

School No: 626

Story Telling Video Conference

Heathlands School is an all age community special school for deaf children. On March 26th 2007 children from the Primary department in St. Albans took part in Video Conferencing event for hearing impaired children, hosted by the London Grid for Learning (LGfL.) The event focused on Story Telling, and gave deaf children from a number of schools in and around London the opportunity to tell stories to each other, through sign language, role play and puppet theatre. Professional story tellers also took part in the day long event, and there were even dancing and cooking demonstrations.

To take part in the event, Heathlands went over to St. Lukes School (635) in Redbourn in order to use the video-conferencing equipment that is set up there.

The children had put a lot of work into dramatising the story of ‘Flat Stanley.’ They had rehearsed the acting and created props. Based on the 1964 story of Stanley Lambchop, Stanley gets flattened by a falling noticeboard, and in his flat state gets used in different ways. These include being flown like a kite and posted like a letter. The childrens’ dramatisation of this story involved playing out the first part, which tells of Stanley’s unfortunate accident, and then offering a choice of endings to the other schools in the video conference. This was done by holding up a large display to the camera, showing the choices available (eg, Stanley is flown like a kite, Stanley is posted like a letter.) Whilst the acting was taking place, sign language was used to tell the story. Additionally, the conference facilitators were able to subtitle the action as the stories were told.

When the choices were offered, the other schools in the conference decided upon which ending they’d like to see next, and this part of the story was told by the Heathlands children, using sign language.

As this was a ‘multicast’ video conference (which means more than 2 end-points participating) the video was managed centrally by the LGfL. This meant that when a school was presenting, other participants could watch the presentation video full screen, but when the choice of endings was offered to the schools the screen was split, so that all the participants could be seen at one time.

There is a video of the events, which features Heathlands, available to watch at:

• mms://media.lgfl.org.uk/files/vc/hi2007.wmv