Visiting Vancouver, Virtually

An article by Darin Wagner

Last Thursday morning I traveled to Vancouver to speak with Mark Bricklin, a reporter for the Vail Daily (Vail, Colorado), who was covering elements of the 2010 Winter Games for the newspaper. Okay, I didn’t really go there in person but used Skype to transport two classrooms of students to the Media Press Center. The original plan was to contact Mark from one of the venues but a wireless connection was not reliable for this meeting.

Using a stand microphone, and a AVRover cart to project the audio feed and Mark’s image on a big screen, students were able to interview him about his experiences. The connection was great and it felt like Mark was in the room. Hey, if Oprah can do this, so can we.

What a great opportunity for students to hear first hand from someone on site. From both the students’ and Mark’s reactions during the session, they both enjoyed the experience. You can read Mark’s thoughts on the experience online.

Skype is such an easy tool to use in the classroom, and can make connections that were were hard, if not impossible before, easy. My first attempt to connect with someone outside the classroom was via e-mail. It was a class in Israel in the early 1990′s. I would ask students to compose messages in a word processing document, then I would cut an paste them together in a long e-mail. After sending, we would wait for a reply and repeat the process again. However primitive it seems by today’s standards, it was still a powerful experience. My strongest memory is of a child who didn’t feel like responding to our last set of questions because rockets had been fired into their settlement and friends had been injured in the attack.

How can you use Skype in th classroom?