Sunday, September 28, 2014

Thoughts about the Live Chat with Jamie

In order to prepare for the chat, in class we did a number of things to get us ready.  First, we did a website investigation. We explored the website reading all of the information that was provided for us and examined the pictures that were offered to us. The second thing we did to prepare ourselves is watch a video which was created by Jamie. Within the video, he talked about the different machines and what they did and how they worked. After watching his video we then had to define some of the words he used in the video. We had to define the words using our google keyword search skills. Some of the words we had to define were slubbing, power loom, sliver, and drawing frame. Finally, we drafted questions to ask Jamie the day of the chat.

I learned a lot of interesting things from the video chat with Jamie. One thing that I learned that I did not know before was that the workers got paid depending on how much they made. So if the cotton you made got ruined then you would not get paid. I also learned that the job of most children was to brush the fiber into a straight line and then give it to the mother of the household to be turned into thread. At the time, the loom was the most valuable thing a family owned and it was passed down from father to son. The chance of injury was so high in the factories because of how dangerous the machines were.  People and children were pulled into machines and their bodies were mangled. People lost limbs daily. They had the children clean because they could reach all the small places. Orphans would be bought and brought to the mills to do this hard job. Throughout the chat I learned many things from Jamie.


Overall I learned a lot from the discussion with Jamie. I thought it was really cool how we got to video chat with someone in England. I liked how we got to ask him questions and interact with him. I would definitely like to do another video chat with experts on other topics throughout the school year. 

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