On Friday 28th February, my Figures (Year 7) Geography class from St. Mary’s Hall in UK took part in a Connected Class video link up with San Luis Gonzaga Jesuit school in Manizales in Colombia.

The focus of the Connected Class was to find out from the students in the school what it was actually like living so close to an active volcano. The school is 52 km from the “Nevado del Ruiz” volcano which erupted as recently as 2016.

In class prior to our video connection, we spent time studying the volcano and the past eruptions. The pupils worked together and prepared a list of questions, which I sent off to the teacher in San Luis Gonzaga school for her pupils to prepare in advance.  On the day everything was incredibly straightforward as we had arranged a time to connect and Ciara from Educate Magis really kindly facilitated the session, which lasted 45 minutes.

The whole experience was incredibly valuable to my students as they gained an excellent understanding of the dangers of living close to the volcano, as well as thorough knowledge of all the monitoring of the volcano that was in place and the advantages that the people gained from living in the area. In fact my pupils were still talking about the Connected Class on Monday morning in their playrooms!

A highlight of the session was definitely when we sang our national anthems to each other! I would thoroughly recommend Connected Classrooms to anyone as this really brought the subject of volcanoes to life for my class.  It was such a worthwhile experience that we are planning another video connection very soon with a school in Mexico to discuss living in an earthquake zone.