I was just a kid in the mid-1990s. Let's take a trip down memory lane for a moment, shall we? Baggy pants were coming into fashion, hip hop music had hit the mainstream in a big way, and everybody knew the Macarena. The internet's ubiquity had not yet been realized, but it was getting close. And Batman had a video phone.
I was so jealous of Batman and his video phone. I remember seeing him talking to Robin, Commissioner Gordon, various scientists when he needed evidence examined, and even Alfred via the video phone he had in the Batmobile! This guy was connected. I can recall thinking that if we could talk to people through a telephone, if sound could be translated into a signal running down a wire, then surely, one fine day, we would figure out how to send video in the same fashion. Of course, the media reporters could send video back to their stations, but that required a lot of equipment and expertise. I fantasized about having the ability to see and talk to people in other places with my own video phone.
And then it happened. Skype came around, and today, anyone with a PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone has the ability to see who they're talking to in real time. And I love it- I talk to my sister in Charleston, SC via Skype. I talk to my brother when he's overseas. Heck, I even Skype my best friend even though she's only 20 minutes away. To me, Skype is an exceedingly useful tool, one which strengthens our connections with those we know, and allows us to make new connections with those we don't. The world has gotten a great deal smaller thanks to applications like this.
I took a look at the educational arm of the Skype website: http://education.skype.com/ . It's got a lot of cool features right on the home page, including teacher, project, and resource counters, which illustrate the huge number of people involved and contributing to the user-generated, Web 2.0 (look at me referencing!) conversation. Discussion boards, related videos and tutorials, and countless project ideas practically jump from the pages. There's a lot of great ideas here- using Skype to connect your class with a class in another country and culture, world weather projects, using Skype to see a place featured in a book the class is reading, having a guest speaker talk to the class.
All told, I'm a big fan of Skype (obviously), I fell that it's capable of making class projects more engaging, educational and edu-taining. It can temper lessons with a dose of real-life, and has, simply put, made the world a much smaller, accessible place to learn and grow as members of our global society.
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