Skype is a very useful tool for communicating with other people, and it can be used in many ways including as a learning tool. Skype could be very useful in the classroom if it were used when a professor is sick or injured and cannot make it to class. He or she could them hold class over Skype so that the students would not have to miss that day's lecture. This could also work the other way around, if the professor was willing. If a student could not make it to class, the professor could have the lecture for all the other students while also having Skype open so that the missing student could be present through it. This would probably only work in small, close-knit classes because otherwise there are too many students missing class every day to be able to Skype them all. It could also be used to facilitate small group discussions. Skype also has a conference call feature, so it would be possible for students to work together from home. Professors could also assign small group projects and then use Skype to check in with the students. In these ways Skype is a very useful and effective tool in the classroom.
However, Skype is not necessarily made for classroom type settings and this is quite apparent in its drawbacks. Skype works better for 1 to 1 or small group connections because it is hard to see and hear otherwise on the small computer camera and microphone. Skype would be hard to use in a lecture style class, unless none of the students asked questions. It would be very hard to ask a question to a professor over Skype because the microphone would not be able to pick up the noise form far away. The professor also would not be able to see the whole class, as the computer's camera cannot span an entire lecture hall let alone provide clear pictures. There are also times when Skype freezes up which would cause problems in a lecture, especially if the students are not able to inform the professor that they did not hear that last part. Skype has many limitations that do not allow it to be used very effectively for large group communication.
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I like the point you make about students using skype to view the professor. It could be useful as long as the connection was stable.
ReplyDeleteI Like your thinking on how to use skype to work on group projects because it would be very easy to have the professor be invited from group chat to group chat when they felt something needed to be clarified. I also agree that lectures would not work because other students voices would cover up the professors and/or have too many people trying to chat in the message board. Skype never was designed for large numbers of people together in the same chat.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Skype is much more suited to one-on-one communication than group communication. I don't necessarily see the purpose of using skype to broadcast lectures to the computers of people at home simply becuase you would have so many students who may be talking over each other. Rather than communication tools, then, maybe teachers should start looking into simple broadcasting tools.
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