Skyping with the States

9 May 2012

For many months, I had been considering organizing a skype session with a class in the United States for my 6th grade students. I was a little hesitant because I wasn't sure if they could really handle it--both behavior-wise and linguistically. Ultimately, I thought it would be good to expose them to other accents and give them the opportunity to practice English with people other than their English teacher and me.

Our experience on the whole was positive. We have a skype session schedule for my other 6th grade class next week. After that experience, I'll write about what I think the students got out of the experience. However, today, I'd just like to talk about what I discovered the hard way because my students were much worse behaved than they normally are.

• Setup is important. Before the actual skype session, it's important to do a practice call. However, there are many factors that go into this setup. 
• Try to have a couple students with you while you do the practice call. When I did the practice call, the American teacher could hear me perfectly. However, when we did the actual call, the American class had difficulty hearing the Spanish students' voices. 
• Think about how you want to arrange the classroom. All of the kids are going to want to be seen by the camera so be sure that you test the camera view ahead of time. Also, make sure that there are pathways so students can easily approach the microphone to ask questions and quickly sit down.
• Preparation and follow up. It's important to talk to the students about the experience before and after.
• Talk to the students about impressions. Ask the students what type of impression they want to give and how they can go about achieving it. 
• Preparing questions ahead of time. Be sure to ask them to write 2-3 questions ahead of time. I guarantee most of them will not be able to think of anything in the moment.
• Give students tasks. I assigned different students various tasks to keep them on track. Two students were secretaries, and one student called on other students to ask questions. I should have had one student be the photographer because I ended up without any pictures of our experience!
• Remind students that they need to speak slowly and clearly. 
• Ask students about their reactions. It's interesting to hear what their first reactions to the experience were. I heard someone say how surprised he was that the American students were all so blond. Another student complained that they spoke too fast (though I told them they do the same in Spanish, but they protested). Some of them noticed differences in language usage.
• Lay down some ground rules. The kids were very excited--which incidentally led them to misbehave. It's hard to be mad at them for this, but you'll lose a lot of time if you can't get them to quiet down. So consider how you are going to deal with misbehavior and understanding checks. 
• Organization. Talk to the other teacher about how you'd like to organize the skype session. We ended up having the students start by introducing themselves (so everyone had a chance to participate). They all had to say their names and their favorite activity. Then, we took turns asking questions. We also agreed to leave the last 5-10 minutes for my Spanish students to teach the American students a little Spanish. 
• Be ready for the end of the call! All of the students are going to rush the camera to wave at the other kids! Give them the chance to do this, but stay close to the computer so you can stop the call when it gets to be obnoxious!