Sixth grade students at the William Davies Middle School, in Mrs. Green's STEM class had the opportunity to connect with a Ms. Theresa Allen's, Twitter @tdallen5, 5th grade class at Catherdral of St. Raymond in Joliet, Illinois. For our connection, we used Google Hangouts.
The day before our connection, students were introduced to the concepts of a Mystery Skype, demonstrate proper etiquette, and job responsibilities. Here is a link to the presentation about proper etiquette during a video call.
In addition, each student was assigned a job. Here is a link to the presentation about job responsibilities during the video call. The jobs were as follows:
- Greeter - welcomes and introduces the class
- Communicator - asks the questions to the class
- Question Keepers - keeps track of the questions and answers from each class
- Geographers - keeps track of the location of the school using a map
- Photographer - takes pictures during the session
- Videographer - takes a video during the session
- Bloggers - summarizes the events during the session
- Sharers - shares state facts
- Closer - concludes the session
Some jobs were required the students to use their Google Apps for Education account and share a Google document to record the information.
A Google map was displayed on a laptop to help the geographers narrow down the location of the school. They used an outline map of the United States to keep track of their location.
Each class asked a series of Yes/No questions to each other to try to guess the locations. After the students guessed each location, they shared state facts with us.
We learned that:
- Chicago is the biggest city in Illinois.
- Illinois is located near lakes, and in the middle of the country
- Illinois has a different time zone. They are 1 hour behind the EST
Here is a short Animoto video from our session. Enjoy!
Classroom Connection using Mystery Skype