To the uninitiated, video conferencing is all about earnest business folk in spectacles impressing each other with flipcharts. However, as Arbour Vale School's Global Leap day demonstrated recently, this wonder of communication technology also has great educational potential.
On 29 February this year, Arbour Vale special school in Slough was the unlikely hub of a video conferencing marathon involving hundreds of participants around the world. Facilitated by Arbour Vale's equipment supplier, PictureTel, whose headquarters also happens to be in Slough, the day began at 6.30am with a virtual tour of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, then moved through Japan, Belfast, Venice, Prague, Romania, the USA and Africa before ending at 10.30pm back in Australia. On the way, it took in NASA astronauts, Save the Children workers in Kosovo, South African game wardens, animals in Melbourne Zoo, a miraculously resurrected Amy Johnson speaking from London's Science Museum, mathematicians from Cambridge University, the Global Leap official poet and a pair of local folk musicians.
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