Ashley Mays had never used the networking program Skype.
"I thought it would be easy," she said.
The 17-year-old used it for the first time in her honors U.S. history class at Newton-Conover Health Science High School. The students in that class paired up with a freshmen English class at Bunker Hill High to discuss transcendental authors.
Skype, a free networking program that can be downloaded to your computer, allows users to talk to each other using Web cams. One person can call the other with the click of a button. Once you're connected, you'll see the other person's face on the computer screen as it's transmitted by their Web cam.
Thursday's venture into online video conferencing didn't go quite as smoothly as students and teachers had hoped. Because there was so much traffic online, the servers had some difficulty keeping up.
"Can you hear me?" "Can you see me?" several students asked when either their audio or video didn't work. But after a few false starts, all the students were connected to the group at the other school.
Jody Dixon, the Newton School's history teacher, said one of the teachers wanted to use the cameras to speak with students in other countries.
Dixon is friends with Keith Wilson at Bunker Hill High. Dixon said he and Wilson thought they could use Skype between their classes.
"We decided to try it and see what happened," Dixon said.
Dixon picked the time period — transcendentalism — and Wilson's students picked the authors. The students at Bunker Hill broke up into groups, and were given a few days to do a literary analysis and a brief biography on the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The seven students at the Newton School had two days to research the historical context of one of the authors.
They then got online using Skype and discussed their findings with their counterparts at Bunker Hill.
"It went OK. I hate Web cams, but I didn't think this was so bad," Mays said. "They told me about who Walt Whitman was and what he wrote and his childhood. I think it would be good for other classes.
Once we got everything working, it went really well and I enjoyed it."
Hang Lak Choi has used Skype before to talk to his cousin and brother at college.
"This was a new thing for us at school," he said. "They told me a lot of new information about Henry David Thoreau. It was fun. And it's always a good thing to talk to another school."
Jessica Abernathy, 17, said she enjoyed learning in a different way.
Dixon said that was part of the idea of the class.
"Mr. Wilson and I talked about what we wanted the students to do and that we wanted each class to have a role," he said. "We wanted them to talk about literature and the author but let them talk about other things for a few minutes and just play around with the technology."
Students at the Newton School finished the class by writing a blog entry about their experiences.
Students at Bunker Hill High will do the same in class today.
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