Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Skyping Experts

Claire Spencer at GSNS has been involved with video conferences to Japan in 2008. She has been traveling the College of Education to use the video conferencing equipment with her class to get to know students in a school in Gifu, Japan. Gifu school is GSNS sister school.

Get to college for the conferences has been a bit of a hassle so someone had suggested Claire and her class use Skype for these conferences.

Claire will use Skype for these conversations, we went over the features of Skype. Skype not only provides a video call but can be used to send files including pictures and to type comments to the person you are speaking to.

Claire would like to be able to get the students to have time speaking to a buddy in the class in Japan. She feels, although the whole class conferences are important, they can be a little impersonal.
She is then going to extend Skype as a classroom resource for gathering information. We emailed Te Papa to see if someone would be available for Claire's class to Skype regarding their current topic study.

As the year goes on Claire is going to teach interviewing and questioning skills so these sessions become more and more worthwhile. Her data collection will be to gather these questions and she will be able to measure the children's skill level of questioning to show progress.
Claire will make decisions as she goes about how she will teach her class about asking higher order questions.

Below are some links about ways levels of questioning can be developed and communicated in the classroom.

Questioning Pedegogy

How teachers can use questioning in the classroom, measuring questions.

Jamie McKenzie on teaching questioning

Improving students' questions


It will be great to see what exciting things Claire's class does with a new tool.

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