Mystery Skype

Post date: Jul 28, 2016 4:46:15 AM

This week, I have completed three skype sessions with three different continents!! Firstly, Year 5 students had a skype call with a school in Kenya. This was fantastic. Both sets of kids asked lots of questions about food, family, friends and culture. Our kids here had some applied geography lessons along the way, learning about the International Dateline, hemispheres, continents and more. The next day, we had a Mystery Skype with a ranger from Yellowstone National Park. Students had to ask simple yes/no questions and had to work out which questions would most effectively reduce the possibilities. After figuring out that questions like, "Does the name of your continent start with the letters A-L" was more effective than "Are you in Asia", the students let out a massive cheer when they hit on the right location. They now have great binary search skills and they are absolute masters of their atlases and Google Maps! Ranger Emma from Yellowstone was amazing and gave us a brilliant presentation on Yellowstone. Unfortunately, her video wasn't working, so we couldn't share her visuals, but fortunately Google Images came to the rescue and I was able to show the students pictures of the animals and geological formations as Emma discussed them. Great news, Emma thinks grizzly bears would probably eat Vegemite if they had the chance!

Our final Skype for the week was another Mystery session, this time with students from a high school in Japan and our Year 8 Japanese class. The kids had so much fun. They battled it out to figure out the location of each other's schools and both did very well asking questions. The students from our school spoke largely in Japanese, and the students from Japan spoke mostly English. This was a great opportunity to practise language skills and to get an introduction to each other's culture. Our kids finished the lesson saying they all want to go to Japan now. We are hoping to continue the connection with the school in the future. Trying to get the kids off the call and back to class was our biggest challenge!

My recommendations if you're going to try it:

• Make sure you have an alternative contact method, eg mobile phone/Hangouts/email, in case anything goes wrong. We had to use alternative methods twice in our setup.
• Assign jobs to students in your class so they are all busy. There are some great comprehensive guides online, but basically you will want people to ask questions, people to assist the "askers", people to search, people to take photos, etc. We had students who were in charge of a shared Google Doc as well - they tidied as the kids went so everything was clear.
• Have a rule for getting immediate silence so you can hear questions and the people you're calling can hear you. For the Yr 5s we had a buzzer, for Yr 8, we used a raised hand from the teacher.
• Leave plenty of time to chat at the end with the person you're calling. This is a great opportunity to learn and is a big part of the excitement.
• Leave time after the call to debrief the kids at home. They will take a while to come down from the excitement, so don't plan to jump straight into a maths test!
• Use the Skype in the Classroom site to find participants, but also contact people you know. Our contact in Kenya came from people I already knew, Yellowstone I found on the Mystery Skype page, the school in Japan found me. Lots of people are willing to link up - make the most of it!