Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Skype in the classroom
The Skype team tech talk we got today worked incredibly well in building off of the information our group presented on flipping the classroom and using online video. Skype definitely improves on one critique of the flipped model in that the lesson and question/answer components of a topic can happen back to back without a day or two gap in between. Flipping the classroom may be appealing for teachers to transmit a lecture to a group of students that are spread out in time and place, and in this aspect, it has an advantage over Skype that still requires students to tailor their schedules to meet at one time. However, Skype has the tremendous advantage of being synchronous, which students prefer more than asynchronous methods according to the assigned reading.
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Do you think you would use Skype in your own classroom?
ReplyDeleteI actually have used Skype on two occasions in class, and based on these positive experiences, I would certainly use it again in a class I instructed. As I mentioned in class, a teacher I was TAing for had to miss the first day of International Conservation. Appropriately, she missed it because she had to attend an international conference on bonobo conservation. She skyped in, got to meet the class, and got to talk about some of the work she was doing from "the field." I think it was a great visible sign of what this topic entails (as well as her dedication to the subject), and it went very well from a technological, logistical, and effective teaching perspective. While I don't expect to use Skype in this specific way too often, I think (as discussed in Carrie's blog) that it can be a powerful tool in connecting students with other research experts that could be asked questions on a topic the class is studying.
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