Throughout the duration of this course, I have learned so many new digital tools and have been enlightened by different global perspectives in the classroom. Although, I am not an education major I still find that what I have learned so far, is useful and helpful information to me as a communications major.
One of my latest assignments that I wanted to focus on for this post was the latest badge I earned through completing an educational course on Microsoft educator. The course I completed was ‘Skype in the Classroom’. It was a brief course that included many videos on the different aspects of implementing Skype into the classroom. One of the uses that I found especially interesting and awesome was what they call ‘Mystery Skype’. This is basically an educational game that uses Skype to video chat with another classroom, no matter their location. The fun of it is is that the teacher knows who they are calling, but the students in the classroom have no idea. So, their task is to discover where these other students they are talking to are located geographically by asking ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions.
Here is a video of ‘Mystery Skype’.
I think that this is such a fun, yet educational activity to do in the classroom. This also helps the students work on their teamwork skills, since they need to take the answers they have been given, go back to their group, and look and analyze maps together to crack the code.
I have always been aware of the popularity and heavy usage of Skype, but was not aware of just how useful it can be in the classroom. By completing this Microsoft course, it taught me more than I ever knew about Skype originally and that it has so many different features and methods to use it.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about this digital tool in the classroom and it was truly interesting to me.