Window to the World
Even though I'm just outside Toronto, Canada, I just a fun little chat with a Year 7 class at a school in country Victoria, Australia.
Anne Baird is a teacher from this Victorian school. Anne and I have been exchanging a few emails and Skype calls recently to share some blog and wiki ideas. Anne noticed I was online and buzzed me to ask if I'd like to talk to her Year 7 kids. I said yes, and the rest was easy. From my place in Canada, she was able to have my voice and video image magically appear on the board in a little school in country Victoria, and then Ms Baird and her kids were able to chat to me about life in Canada.
We spoke for about 25 minutes, and the kids asked me a bunch of questions about Canada, what it was like, the weather, the food, the people, and so on. Then my daughter - who is in Year 6 here in Canada walked past the computer so I put her on for a chat. Kate told them about school here, what it was like to live in a different country and so on...
Here's the thing about this... the time taken to organise this event was about 2 minutes. The cost to make it happen was zero. The effort of taking part required a single mouse click on the Accept button.
It made me wonder... why don't we take more advantage of these technologies in schools? We so often want to expose kids to bigger ideas and to let them ask questions from people who are outside their own little world, and the technology to do this is right here, right now. The technical barrier to using this stuff is ridiculously low. It requires very little special technical skill or know-how, and is not difficult to set up, and costs virtually nothing. We really should be using it more than we do.
And why don't we? Too often the barrier for real-time collaboriative tools is that school systems block such traffic from their networks. Administrators unthinkingly deny access to collaborative technologies like Skype, MSN, and so on, because they think that if the network enabled kids to talk with people outside the classroom it would be dangerous or distract them from the work they should be doing, so they just turn it off.
But the way I see it, the value of being able to connect to the outside world could be incredibly valuable if we just manage it the right way. Of course you probably can't just give open Skype access to every kid, but in many school systems the one-size-fits-all approach to online security is so restrictive that it stops anyone, including many teachers, from using these powerful learning tools with their kids.
Anne Baird is a teacher from this Victorian school. Anne and I have been exchanging a few emails and Skype calls recently to share some blog and wiki ideas. Anne noticed I was online and buzzed me to ask if I'd like to talk to her Year 7 kids. I said yes, and the rest was easy. From my place in Canada, she was able to have my voice and video image magically appear on the board in a little school in country Victoria, and then Ms Baird and her kids were able to chat to me about life in Canada.
We spoke for about 25 minutes, and the kids asked me a bunch of questions about Canada, what it was like, the weather, the food, the people, and so on. Then my daughter - who is in Year 6 here in Canada walked past the computer so I put her on for a chat. Kate told them about school here, what it was like to live in a different country and so on...
Here's the thing about this... the time taken to organise this event was about 2 minutes. The cost to make it happen was zero. The effort of taking part required a single mouse click on the Accept button.
It made me wonder... why don't we take more advantage of these technologies in schools? We so often want to expose kids to bigger ideas and to let them ask questions from people who are outside their own little world, and the technology to do this is right here, right now. The technical barrier to using this stuff is ridiculously low. It requires very little special technical skill or know-how, and is not difficult to set up, and costs virtually nothing. We really should be using it more than we do.
And why don't we? Too often the barrier for real-time collaboriative tools is that school systems block such traffic from their networks. Administrators unthinkingly deny access to collaborative technologies like Skype, MSN, and so on, because they think that if the network enabled kids to talk with people outside the classroom it would be dangerous or distract them from the work they should be doing, so they just turn it off.
But the way I see it, the value of being able to connect to the outside world could be incredibly valuable if we just manage it the right way. Of course you probably can't just give open Skype access to every kid, but in many school systems the one-size-fits-all approach to online security is so restrictive that it stops anyone, including many teachers, from using these powerful learning tools with their kids.
[...] I have a routine at the beginning of each IT lesson to always have my laptop connected to the interactive whiteboard, data projector and internet whether I plan to use them or not. There have been many instances when we have been discussing something as a class where we have wondered about an issue or an idea and then quickly googled it or gone to Visual Thesaurus Googlemaps or Wikipedia to check something out immediately. The other day we were just about to start our class when the students noticed the Skype icon pop up as one of my Skype friends logged in and naturally being curious they asked what it was. Well I couldn’t resist, so out the door went the lesson plan and in came a quick lesson on Skype. A minute or so later we were Skypeing with Chris Betcher and his daughter over in Canada. Chris had his webcam on so that added another excitement for the kids as they could see as well as hear Chris and Kate. It was fantastic and we had other teachers come into the room to see what was going on. Chris has blogged about this as well on his blog. The wonderful thing as Chris said was that it took no time and was a really powerful opportunity to make links across the world. What I saw was total engagement, every student was totally engrossed. Many went home and checked out Skype for themselves. But I think the best thing was the chance to talk to Chris and Kate about their experiences in Canada and the opportunity for us to spontaneously (if only virtually) spread our wings into the big wide world. It’s certainly something we will do again. In fact we are already planning another skype opportunity with some students in Phoenix, Arizona. [...]
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