Mystery Skype!
Mystery
skype is an educational game invented by teachers where students have to guess
where the other classroom is from by asking the class questions about their
location. This educational, interactive, and engaging game helps students to
better understand other cultures around the world. There is even a translator
feature to assist with any language barrier that may come up during the mystery
skype session. Before beginning to incorporate mystery skype sessions in your
classroom, it is important to discuss with the students what exactly will be
taking place, the expectations you have for your students, how the students
need to behave, and what each student should be doing during the mystery skype
session. It is a good idea to give each student a job when implementing mystery
skype in the classroom, so that each student has a purpose and can be involved
in this exciting experience. If students do not have jobs assigned to them
prior to the session, an exciting and fun experience could quickly become a
very hectic experience without any resolution in the mystery. To prevent this
exciting opportunity from becoming hectic, the teacher can assign the following
jobs: greeter/ closer, question creator, question asker, runner, google mapper,
globe looker, atlas flipper, dot jotter, observer, and the hypothesis maker. In
addition to letting your class skype with another classroom in another state or
country, you can also let your class mystery skype with an author or
illustrator. The teacher can read a variety of books by different authors to
the students. Then schedule a mystery skype session with one of them, but not
tell the students which one it will be with. The students can then ask
questions about the books until they discover which author or illustrator they
are talking to. This would be an exciting experience for the students, and
could get students to discover new books that they would like to read by that
same author. I can definitely see myself using mystery skype in my classroom. I
feel like I would be just as excited as the students would be about a mystery
skype session. I would like to implement mystery skype with another classroom,
an author or illustrator, meteorologist, and public figures in the community. I
feel that these mystery skype session help to build a close and collaborative classroom
environment. The students will quickly learn that in order for us all to solve
the mystery, the whole class has to be friendly and work together. The students
must be able to think critically when using the maps to figure out where a
classroom is from or which book that the particular author wrote. They also
must be creative when developing their questions, because they can only ask questions
that have a yes or no answer. Communication is used, because the students are constantly
communicating with their peers and the person or group of people that they are
mystery skyping. Collaboration is used, because the students will have to learn
how to collaborate or work with their peers in order to be successful with this
activity. Mystery skype leads to endless engaging learning experiences that the
students will be sure to remember!
This teacher's blog is literally everything you would ever need to know about mystery skype. How to start, how to find partners to skype, why to use mystery skype, and much more!
A glance at some ideas of questions asked for a mystery skype session!
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