Science Video Conferencing

Science Video Conferencing

On September 11th we had the opportunity to observe a live science lesson from a primary school in Cornwall.  No, we didn’t all drive to Cornwall, we watched from the comfort of our own classroom in Manchester.  Thanks to Skype technology we were able to watch the whole lesson and hear everything that went on, we were even given the opportunity to ask the children and the teacher questions.  It was useful to see a real science lesson and to actually see some of the principles I’ve learnt over the past couple of weeks put into action and working in the classroom set-up.

You might be thinking, what has video conferencing got to do with teaching?  I’ve been thinking about this and an obvious idea is to use video conferencing as part of language lessons in school.  An important part of the languages curriculum is for children to make contact with native speakers, this is done through partner schools.  A video conference could be held between the two partner schools and as long as the lesson is well planned and structured, the children in both schools would be able to really engage with the language.