Mystery SKype Connecting Students Globally
This is what your classroom will potentially look like when you at Mystery Skyping! You will brainstorm possible questions and have those written down for your students so they are easy to read and follow along to during the skype sesson andy you will display a map in which you can cross of the regions for which the class you are skyping with does not preside. Mystery Skyping works on so many things with your students!
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A Little Bit About One Best Thing: One Best Thing is a collection of books created by Apple Distiguished Educators that demonstrate the use of Apply technologies to transform teaching and learning. Each one best thing book shares a unit, lesson, or a best practice and is specifically designed to help other educators implement this in their classroom. The Book I chose: I chose a book that focuses on Mystery Skypes and how students can connect globally. The author of this book is Carrie Zimmer. She is currently working at the American School of Milan in Milan, Italy. She has 15 years of educational expierence and that is not all spent as a general education teacher. She transitioned from the classroom to a technology specialist position and is always looking for fun and exciting ways to incoporate technology products into instruction. In her One Best Thing Book, she talks about how classrooms today have the opportunity to expand beyond their four walls and bring in resources and ideas from around the world to change the educational expierence for their students. One of the best ways to connect with other classrooms is through a Mystery skype. You have to begin this process by finding a classroom on twitter that will likely participate in this with you. She talks about how this process will increase student confidence in communicating with others, increase their fluency in the use of map-based applications, and increase their knowledge of world geography. The only way this will work, however, is if your school is one-to-one or has access to technonly such as, and iPhone, iPad or computer. What is a Mystery Skype: This is when two or more classes call each other via video chat and try to guess where the other class is located in the world. Particiapants as and answer questions that have been pre-prepared and provide clues when necessary. The teachers will be the only ones who know the location of the other participants. Below I have provided an example of a classroom teacher who is using Mystery Skype in her own classroom. Her students talk about their expierences. |
Using Mystery Skype in your classroom would be a fun and interactive way to get your students thinking about different cultures and ways of life. It helps students work on their communication skills and work together as a team to solve a problem. Using this in your classroom is a no brainer. It makes learning material fun and exctiting for your students and helps them build so many different relationships with people across the world. It reminds me a lot of a "pen-pal." I remember classrooms when I was in grade school that had a classroom in another country that they wrote and video chatted with frequently. This created lasting freindships and instilled great communicaton skills in his students.