Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Video Conferencing

After watching the video "Video Conferencing: Its Free, Easy, and Powerful" it is clear to me that video conferencing can be a very important tool that can be used in the class room. One of the students that the man in the video had could not attend class due to medical difficulties, so they used Skype to bring her to class through a video conference. The children in the class seemed to respond very well to this. There are also many instances where a class can bring in a speaker that may be hard to reach. They can then get permission from that speaker and record their presentation then share it with others through a video or audio conference. Another very interesting thing that the teachers students did was create collaborative stories. They did not just collaborate with the other students in their class, but they had video conferences with other students on the other side of the country. This was great for the kids because they could get ideas that no one in their class may have come up with. This video has shown me a lot about what can be done with video conferencing. I hope that I will be able to incorporate some of these techniques into my own classroom.