Do you remember George Jetson? His video phone that let him talk to his family and see them at the same time. Well Skype does this with two computers. In a similar way that a Podcast sends sound and YouTube sends video, Skype sends them together from both your computer and that of the computer on the other end. This simulates a telephone call. The picture at the right is of my family in Cuenca, Ecuador during an earlier visit. We Skype from Houston to Cuenca to keep in touch. It is so cool to see them crowd around the computer to fit everyone in the web camera's field of view. While many of the adults haven't changed from year to year, the little ones grow up so fast that Skype offers a great way to watch them grow between visits.
Skype is a great educational tool as well. When you think of equity of access to technology, think of Skype. For a small amount of donated hardware and an Internet connection two cultures can come together.
Cultures, I focus on "culture" because a face to face is more reveling than email, library books, film strips or text books. When two students get together they find a way to share and communicate ideas about where they live and what the have in common and what is different. This can mean lessons in ecology, language, social studies, science, history, politics, art, and so much more. The only caveat is time zones. When calling long distance north and south are no problem. Cuenca is in the same time zone as Houston, but Paris is about 7 hours earlier. So a morning call here could be an after school or evening call somewhere else.
Setting up a Skype kiosk in another schools is a great community service project. Students can raise the money to buy a set of computers and send one to the other school and begin sharing.
Skype isn't the only tool or the best one, but it is the most common and most prevalent. Blue Jeans, WebX, Go-to-meeting, meetinganywhere, and anymeeting are all tools that I have either tried or investigated. They all offer the two way communication over the Internet but each adds different features like desktop control, a white board work area, chatting on the side while conferencing, multiple parties, as in not just to callers but many more and in various locations.
Recently, I called tech support at Adobe and they jumped into a conference tool like PC anywhere and shared my computer's desktop, mouse and keyboard and verbally explained what I needed to do next time. That was really helpful.
These are awesome teaching tools and can make a big difference in a child's life. I started using them for tech support calls and then to family calls to gain confidence before trying to use it in the classroom. My advice is practice at home before trying to use Skype in the classroom as nothing is worse than a room full of students waiting for technology to start working. It can turn minutes into hours.
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