Thursday, January 30, 2014

Reading Reflection 1 (January 30, 2014)


In the article, Where in the World Are they? Students Find Out with Mystery Skype, elementary school teacher Pernille Ripp, tried out a new activity on her fifth grade class called “Mystery Skype”. The idea of Mystery Skype is to connect students to other students across the United States, even the world. The students come up with questions to ask one another about their state or community. Finding out where the students they are talking on Skype live, they look up information about that region. This includes geography facts and the history about that area. In order for this to be an efficient, organized activity, students are given different jobs when the Skyping is going on. This includes greeters, answerers, question recorders, etc. This keeps all the students busy while the Skyping is going on and the classroom organized. It is also important that the teacher check to do a test run before doing the actual activity because there could be technical problems or a bad connection.

As a future history/social studies teacher, this activity intrigued me. This idea could not only work for elementary school students, but higher grades as well. This would be a fun interactive activity that where students could get a different cultural perspective of other students their age living in different parts of the world. But they would also benefit from it educationally because they would be able to learn about the geography and history of that region.

This is related to NETS-S because there is use of technology where you can video chat with anyone across the world and learn about different parts of the world. Students are able to get a whole new perspective through the technology of Skype and other video chatting applications. I think that this is a great use of technology, but like all types of technology in the classroom, it should be monitored and the teacher should have control over it.

 

Ripp, P. (2013, February). Where in the world are they? students find out with mystery skype. Learning and Leading, 40(5),

2 comments:

  1. I love this idea of "Mystery Skype". I think it will really expose children and teens to different cultures around the world. It allows them to make friends and meet people they would most likely never have met. This activity is perfect for you since you want to become a history teacher, you should definitely look into doing this with your classroom.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think this is a great idea, it is important for students to interact with people that come from different cultures. Normally people would have to travel to experience culture, but in today's modern world teachers can use things like this "mystery Skype" in order to have students interact with people from different places and a variety of cultures. This is a great use of modern technology in the realm of education.

    ReplyDelete