Skype and the Snow Day

In September 2009, we discussed how to plan a virtual class for a flu epidemic, but in Feb 2010, I realized the same concepts could be used for a snow day as well (and TLT thought it was a brilliant concept too).

There are some great suggestions at the link above, but I found my own twist, thanks to my linguistics students. I had been planning to hold a session in Adobe Connect, but the students weren’t sure what that meant. Fortunately one said “Oh you mean Skype in”, and I thought “Why yes, Skype is a good option.” When I asked students if they had a Skye account, they all said they did, so I decided to go with it.

To get to the details, I asked students to e-mail me their Skype IDs so I could add them to my Contacts list. On the day and time when we normally would meet in class, I sat in a Rider conference room and initiated a conference call. I was also able to use Adobe Connect for screen sharing without audio. The only quirk was that I wanted to show a video, and because the audio wasn’t coming through Skype, students couldn’t hear anything. Something to work on for next time.

Interestingly, I ran one session as a “test”, but this week we ran it for real. This time I had some “guest speakers” from ETS, but we were able to sit in a conference room and use my Mac laptop speakers/mike and it still worked well. Of course, a lot of our activities are hands on in the lab, so I am actually crossing fingers that I won’t have to do this again.

But it’s great to have one more option to work with.

P.S. Thanks to all our guest speakers for participating in the session. It was a very interesting discussion for me. Hope to share details soon, but I have to check with the students first…

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2 Responses to Skype and the Snow Day

  1. ELIZABETH J PYATT says:

    I agree, although one person said she didn’t know about Skype until she spent time in Germany. Skype is definitely popular world wide.

  2. That is awesome! Amazing how much we can do with a little creativity and some effort. Really interesting that the students translated Adobe Connect to Skype. That should tell us something!

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