I teach a Social Studies class called Current Issues and we have monthly video conferences with classes from other parts of the globe. So far we have used Skype but we are experimenting with ooVoo and SightSpeed. The students love it. We were talking to Russians immediately after the the conflict in Georgia and got an entirely different viewpoint that we did in the US media. Currently, we are expanding our communications to other countries and are even in the beginning process of planning a joint humanitarian project with a school in Cameroon. There is something surreal about the first moment students from the other side of the world appear before us in our classroom. Here are a couple of photos of us in progress:
hi nate,
recently i attended a seminar who was really targeted at librarians but i bet you can use it with your class. you can use the cameras for what is called peer teaching with podcasts, and one way of using this is through kids recording themselves while explaining a lesson (basically , creating a tutorial). This tutorial can be uploaded to your school website or just leave it in your computer folders for others students to go through it and maybe catch up with previous lessons they've missed. I know there are heaps of programs you can use, but I've uploaded my notes on that short talk. They're a bit messy, but I think they serve the purpose. You just need to play with it and make it work for you. The website of this really good school in Sydney that's using this kind of approach is Riverview and they are at http://www.riverview.nsw.edu.au/ you can check their podcasts online.
I hope this helps and let me know if you use it and how you make it work for you.
I found this while doing research. I do the marketing for Naturally Hawaiian Gallery and Hawaii's Nature Artist Patrick Ching is now set up to be a guest Art Teacher via webcam for anyone who is interested. He will be starting in February, doing private lessons, offering his time to schools and also offering for people to "sit in" on his classes at his gallery.(laptop will be in an empty seat and those watching will experience as if they were in the class) I am currently researching school budgets to see what they can afford as he is already overextended in his community work and will only be offering free classes to schools with certain special needs. He will have his camera set up at his beach house or in his outdoor classroom in the country in Hawaii so we thought this would be great for schools who want to get their students excited about class, or want to expose them to different cultures. He has a beautiful beach in the background where you can see turtles just swimming around. He gets amazing results and kids and teachers love him. We will be using BLOGTV which we are already set up on. If anyone is interested in getting more info contact Daniela at Naturally Hawaiian Gallery 808-259-5354 or naturallyhawaiian@gmail.com. Aloha!
for what age group? if the students are old enough to create presentations, it may be interesting to get your students to record web presentations and use it to share and teach other students globally online. check out our website for creating and synchronizing powerpoint plus video (it's free) and we'd also be happy to sponsor a collaborative project with other schools as well.