In getting more familiar with a new technology this week, I really wanted to look more into how teachers have used Skype (a software application that allows people to make free video and voice calls over the Internet) to liven up their lesson plans. Search results brought about my discovery of this blog. The blogger has listed "50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom".
Out of the fifty, here are a few of my favorite:
1. Use Skype to connect your language classroom to a classroom abroad
With Skype's newer feature of viewing video in full screen mode it makes it easier for classroom use. This video chatting creates a link for students to native speakers. The best way you can learn a language the way a native uses it is to, simply, learn it from the source - the native speaker. Using Skype in this way opens the door and, more so, tears down the classroom walls to a world foreign to the language learner.
2. Take your students on a field trip
Although, a field trip by live video, while sitting in an uncomfortable and stiff desk isn't exactly an ideal experience or opportunity for learning for students -- especially when compared to physically being somewhere, tasting, smelling, seeing, touching, and hearing things first-hand -- Skype makes a "field trip" possible when they can't physically go on one.
Understandably, in today's economy, a field trip just may not be possible because of budgetary constraints. Whether the students are actually at the zoo or taking a tour of it with Skype, they're still able to see and learn from a real-life experience; they're not just reading about animals from a textbook or a lecture from a teacher.
Something more exciting... taking a Skype field trip to a place outside of the state, the country, the continent!
I would go crazy with this if it was easy to do....
I could take my students to see an art museum in France, the Taj Mahal, tour of the swamp land in Florida, down under to Australia, the Andes Mountains in South America, Poland, Italy, Greece, Africa, Russia, Greenland, etc; I could go on and on. BUT this seems like wishful thinking; I wonder how extravagantly teachers have been able utilize a Skype for this type of "field trip".
3. Parent-teacher conferences via Skype
The reality is that there are parents that would really like to be able to find the time to meet with their children's teachers, but work or other obligations get in the way. Skype could make these meetings easier for parents to schedule into their busy days, without having to leave work and make the trip out to the school.
Besides these examples, the blog also provides links for tutorials of Skype and connections to other teachers using Skype around the world.
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