Skype and FaceTime

By Anonymous -



Recently, we had a Video Conferencing session at our school put on by our tech assistant, Matt Storz.  I was unable to attend, but Matt filled me in on what he knew about using Skype.  Very useful information.


Yesterday my kids, Ryan and Robert, had off of school due to a teacher in-service.  So I decided to take advantage of the situation and Skype with them from our classroom. 


I also decided to use FaceTime and found out only a few of the students in our class knew what it was or how to use it.


Here are some pictures of us using Skype and Facetime.




To give us a purpose, and as an educational activity, our students at school, and my kids at home, had to search and find 4-5 objects that had some quality in common.  Perhaps the objects were all the same shape or color, or they may have all been made of the same material.  The kids then shared with each other the objects they chose and everyone tried to guess what the objects had in common.  The students and Ryan and Robert had a good time trying to guess the common factor.  


Here are two short videos of us using Skype and FaceTime.







By  far, FaceTime had better video quality than Skype and took no set up or download time.  We now plan to try using FaceTime with  Apple TV to project FaceTime from our iPad onto a large screen and see how good the quality of the video is there.  

The biggest question our students had after we finished Skyping was whether they have Skype on their laptops and if they could each have their own accounts.  

Of course this would mean I would need to put in several hours downloading Skype onto 25 computers and setting up 25 Skype accounts.  We'll see.  


If you would like to know more about Skype or FaceTime, I'd be happy to share what I know with you.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concrete Poetry Sites - This Is So Much Fun!

By -
Image
Poetry Month is Right Around the Corner Are you getting ready for Poetry Month in April? If so, I have some resources to share with you for creating concrete poems. Concrete poems are words written in a shape to convey a poem. They look like this: Recently I went on a mission to search for a site to use with a fellow colleague and her students. They wanted to make concrete poetry on their Chromebooks. There aren't many sites that allow the user to actually write words into any shape.  There is the Read, Write, Think interactive for Theme Poetry.  Here is what it looks like. The words can be added inside of a shape. The interactive guides students through the writing process There is a site from WildAboutWoods.org  where a person can choose a shape or draw one of their own and add words inside of the shape. There are word banks to choose from or a person can type in their own words to add to the shape. I like that adding words is as simple as click ...
Read more

My Blog Makeover - How I Did It

By Anonymous -
Image
I love change and and rarely do the same thing over and over.  So a blog makeover was  inevitable .  It takes quite a bit to make a blog look completely different, but I have found ways to make it easier on myself. Here are the resources I used to complete my blog makeover.   I found the background at the Dotty Dot Dot blog.  I chose Summer Sunset and simply had to copy the code and insert it.  I found directions on how to do this here .  I could have use the header (the title at the top of a blog) from this site as well, but I decided it was too plain, so I searched for a different header. Shabby Blogs provided me with a header that fit my background perfectly.  I found directions to change my header here . I wanted to add my blog title to the header, so I used a photo editing site called Fotoflexer .  This was the first time I had used this site and I loved it!  I have since used Fotoflexer for some other projec...
Read more