The author of the article titled “You Are There” is also a classroom educator of social studies himself. Dealing with budget cutbacks and the inability to take all of his students across the United States for a field trip of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, he decided to make technology work for him. He uses video conferencing technology like Skype to take his students on field trips. The first video conferencing that he did was of the Constitution Center. It worked out well. The students were able to virtually “walk through” the museum with their tour guide and ask questions as if they were really there. One other time, he used video conferencing with an author of a book that they had just read. The students were able to actually get to see the author and sit down and have a one to one “chat” with her. Because video conferencing allows for streaming video to be displayed as well as sound, the author was able to show the students sound of the real props that were mentioned within the story of the book. For the students, this really made the book that they had just read more meaningful and lifelike. To put the icing on the cake…it was all FREE! Video conferencing using free 2.0 applications such as Skype, Oovoo, and CamTwist do not cost a thing so using them for educational purposes works out wonderfully.
Some things to keep in mind before you do decide to do your initial video conference is performing a dry run. This allows for any bugs to be worked out before you go live in front of your students. While performing this dry run, some things to watch out for are sound quality, video delay, lighting, camera placement, or any other technology blips that you wouldn’t otherwise think about happening until it does. One other thing that should be noted is that you must have a good camera and microphone. This can either be integrated into your laptop or stand alone. A stand alone video camera and microphone tends to work out a little better in the classroom setting because it can be tilted and turned in ways that a built-in camera cannot be moved. Lastly, the article mentioned that the megapixel in the video camera does matter if you are plan on capturing video of close up objects (like frog dissections). If you don’t plan on doing any video of these sorts of things then a cheaper camera with a lower megapixel quality would suite you just fine.
I can now say that I’ve used Skype before in my own career. However I didn’t use it to take my students on a field trip anywhere. I used it when I was a substitute teacher in a school district that was without a German teacher. I was able to use Skype to help bring the teacher that they had hired into the classroom from the privacy of her own home. It was a great experience for the kids to be able to see and hear the teacher even thought she wasn’t physically there.
Langhorst, Eric. (2009, June). You Are There. School Library Journal, 55(6), 46. Retrieved November 5, 2009.
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