This is a personal account of a recent videoconference I had with my Year 3/4 class and our new French partner school. I’ve posted this not as an expert (I’m still rather a novice at videoconferencing) but in the hope of showing other people what we’re trying out and how we’re learning on the way!

10th February: Battle ships

We had our second video conference with Ecole la Fontaine today. It went well and the children were really excited about it. The plan this time was to play battle ships and it fitted in really well with our maths topic.

In retrospect, I’m not sure that it was the easiest thing to do so early in our videoconferencing relationship, but I would certainly do it again with a few refinements. The plan was to have a 10×10 grid and hide 5 battleships: due to time constraints(we were just under an hour!) and attention spans, I think next time we might use a smaller grid,maybe 7×7 and have shorter ships!

The plan worked well, but it was quite hard to hear and we ended up having to repeat ourselves and check things repeatedly to make sure we’d got it right. For my children there was also bit of an issue over the g/j in French, but having a lovely colleague on the other side of the screen made things much easier. I was quite amused to hear the mix of French and English that the children were using, just like the way that Rachida and I were swapping between the two languages.

A good tip that I’ll do again next time: blow up a large grid and have two versions for the children on either side of the board, one with your ships, the other with theirs and get a reliable child to mark them off accordingly. This is helpful as you will have your hands full trying to do everything else! Also make sure the children are clear which is which to avoid having to clarify/check things as you go along. Watch out that both teams have the same system for labelling the axis as our French partners had A1 in the top left hand corner…

I loved the way that both teams were so good natured and supportive: the French cheered us when we got one of their ships and vice-versa. I’m not sure that Nelson would have been very proud of our efforts that day, but it was huge fun and roll on the re-match!