Alan November, Part 4
OK, I only have a couple more blogs to do to help recap the incredible session with Alan November at NMSA in Houston, TX last week. This one has to do with Skype.
Since so few people in the crowd were using Skype (a few more had heard of it), Alan decided a quick show-and-tell was in order. However, since his Mac wasn’t working on the wifi (PCs worked great BTW), he had his assistant from McDougal-Littel set her computer up. But then, he didn’t have access to any of his Skype accounts. So….
Alan asked for volunteers from the audience who knew a teacher with a Skype account. He took the first 2 (I was the 3rd hand raised - sorry Teryl and Karla!) and within 2 minutes had 2 classes join us at NMSA. One class had a video camera in the room so we got to see the kids as well. Cool!
Now, I know DEN teachers who are using Skype to put their kids into webinars hosted by Discovery. It is a little harder to do that in middle school because you are limited to just a few of the kids on your team. But, Alan shared a best practice idea geared toward elementary that would work across the spectrum.
He told us of a class with a high percentage of ESL students. Many had not been in the country long and they missed their family overseas. One girl from India came to her teacher crying because she missed her grandmother. She got the grandmother’s email address and was in touch with her immediately with instructions on how to install and use Skype. The next day, she put the little girl on the computer for a free phone call to India! After that, every kid in the class wanted to talk to their grandmothers!
In another class, they were reading a short story set in Ireland. One grandmother who lived in another state was from Ireland and spoke with an Irish brogue. The teacher mailed her a copy of the story, got her to read the story on Skype with the record button on, and then played the grandmother reading the story to the class.
Because that worked so well, the teacher mailed out stories to all the grandmothers she could contact and mailed them each different stories. She recorded them all so the kids could have their grandmothers read to the class.
How do you use Skype in your classroom? Leave a comment to tell us your best practice ideas. You can find me on Skype at tim.den.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
I just caught up on all of your posts. Thanks for all of the great info. It really causes me to think about how I can get students to produce more than I have thought possible. I guess I am going to have to get Skype so I can be with the “in” crowd!