Feb 25 2008
Skype or Not?
Skypecasts Academic Potential is out there promoting Skype and Skypecasts in education. Edutechie.com facilitated a Skypecast recently to talk to others about using Skype in Education. It did not work as well as he would have liked. When too many people try to join the chat at the same time you have chaos and that is what he had during the first few minutes. When he used his moderator tools, things calmed down and were more orderly. Skypecasting takes practice, organization, and dedication. It is a good place for people to practice talking to others from foreign countries if they want to improve their language skills. I think Skype can be very useful for families, small work groups, and college study groups. I am not sure I would ever use it for the classroom, though because I think there are easier ways to accomplish the same goal. In the future, I think I would use AOL IM Video to connect with other educators and students. It is more user friendly and you can see the people you are talking to quite easily. Whatever you decide to use, using a real-time connection helps build relationships, helps turn work around faster, and keeps people motivated because they have fun using it.
One response so far
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
One Response to “Skype or Not?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I agree about the issues that are inherent in Skype, but I also see that the potential is good for education for Skype or whatever similar technology that follows it. I know that at my school, the techies have been “playing with it for a while.” I think that the video-conference has not worked well if there were more than 5 people involved. We can’t use AOL IM at my school except indirectly through iChat because AOL causes “not so good very bad things” to happen on our network. Also, the advantage of the voice is lost if a teacher wants to communicated privately with another teacher when students are nearby. In that case the IM feature is satisfactory. I would, however, like to try it for a department meeting! If everyone had to stop and think while keying in a response, things might get less heated