The best place to go to connect with other classrooms is the Skype Education website. This is a page where classrooms can post topics that they are interested in Skyping about. When you first go to the website, you choose the subject, and then you can search through postings
on different topics. Each topic has information describing who is posting the
ad, and what they are looking to do. Some postings are younger classrooms
talking about their hometown, and want to connect with other young classrooms
to hear what they like about their town. I saw a lot from different countries
wanting to connect with an English-speaking classroom. There were even some debates going on in the high school grades.
The best aspect of using Skype in the classroom is being
able to connect with other people from different locations or cultures. I think
that the hardest part of teaching social studies is having students, especially
younger ones, grasp the ideas that they don’t normally come in contact with. This
is especially true with teaching about different cultures; if students don’t
interact with different cultures, they may think that they are “weird.” I think
it would be very cool if they could interact with those cultures over Skype to
help them be more culturally aware.
Another pro to using Skype is that it is super cost
effective, and using the service is free. So if a classroom is already equipped
with a webcam, speakers, and microphone, then that’s basically all that is
needed. Many schools have a tight budget, so this is a cheap way to help students connect to the outside word. I would assume that for many schools, field trips are not a high priority when it comes down to money, so this can help students learn from outside the classroom.
Before I started looking at the website and reading about
different requests that classrooms had, I was really on the fence about how
useful Skype would really be. But now I can’t wait to use this tool in my
classroom one day.
I really like the idea of using Skype in the classroom. I am not a Social Studies major, but I think that Social Studies is one of those disciplines that can become very isolated from the real world and be boring to many students. We tend to talk a lot about different cultures, but we really only expose students to them through textbooks and sometimes YouTube videos. I think one of the greatest things about Skype is that it allows us the opportunity to interact directly with the students. In this way, it makes multicultural education much more hands-on and meanginful to the students we are instructing. However, the question I am wondering about is if there any downsides to having such cross-cultural interactions? I think that if there were teachers and students having a Skype session in two different countries, both teachers would obviously need to collaborate in order to create an engaging lesson plan that manages to have students come out learning something relevant that they can apply to their own lives. However, I think teachers should make students aware of how some things that we think are socially acceptable here may be considered rude by other students. There are most certainly downsides. I do like that you brought up this idea because I think that I can maybe even use this in the English classroom to a certain extent in order to teach my students.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great tool! Students can really get a taste of diversity and begin to further understand other cultures. Communication can happen that could never have been possible before. In an art classroom students may even be able to communicate with artists!
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