Megaconference Junior is an international schools’ videoconference that takes place every year. Young people (mainly aged 7 – 19) from the US, UK, Croatia, Australia and Asia join together to share stories, ideas, jokes, recipes and much more. This event is completely free, and there is no cost involved for UK schools using the Janet videoconferencing service, more information about the service can be found at: www.ja.net/janetvc

The next Megaconference Junior event will take place on 2 May 2013. This will be the 10th anniversary of this exciting videoconference and we’re hoping to get a few more UK schools and colleges to join in.

If your school hasn’t participated in a videoconference already, this might be a good opportunity to get started.

If you’re a more experienced videoconference participant, maybe you’d like to present a session and be famous for 15 minutes. You might even want to be a video jockey (VJ) – see below for more details about what this entails.

There are different types of participants – viewers and presenters.

There are 2 types of viewer:

1. Non-interactive ones (they don’t ask questions) and can view the video of the event as it happens. Some of the schools that are new to videoconferencing choose this type of participation. These participants can join and leave at their own convenience.

Please Note – you do not need any videoconferencing equipment for this type of participation. You just need to have Internet access to view the live video stream and can watch all day if you like. Further information about the video stream will be available in due course.

 2.   Interactive viewers will be able to ask questions and talk to the presenters. These participants will have a fixed time slot to join and   depart using an H.323 videoconference system or client e.g. Polycom, Cisco devices.

There are 2 types of presenter:

1. Presenters can talk about a topic that interests them e.g. food, hobbies, their local area, things that are happening at their school or college, pets, family, environmental issues, etc. They could sing, dance, debate, act out a scene or simply tell a story. Presenters can have a time slot of 15 or 20 minutes each.
2. Video Jockey (VJ) organisations chat to the viewers in between presentations, similar to a chat show host. They can do presentations also. If for any reason a site cannot take part and they have booked a time slot to present, a VJ site can fill in for them. VJs tend to have a longer time slot – usually around an hour. Training will be provided for these participants by the event organisers in the USA.

What does it look like?

A short clip of some previous years: http://youtu.be/NcV_gcsX2vI

* Please email vtas@ja.net of your intent to view so we can help establish the best streaming method for you.

Paul Bonnett (telephone 01235 822 332) and Phyllis Callinan (telephone 01235 822 263) will be assisting UK sites with any questions they may have. Email enquiries can be sent to vtas@ja.net. 

More details including registration forms can be found here:

http://megaconferencejr.org/