How Can Educators Create an Effective Connected Classroom?

A connected classroom is a smart-learning environment that is open to the outside world. With this approach, students get to learn from real-life situations and connect with other learners across the globe. With the widespread use of internet and web 2.0 technologies, creating connected classrooms has become much easier. Before we look at the web tools that you can use to open the classroom doors to a global audience, let us look at some of the academic advantages of adopting such an approach.

Connected classrooms can help students:

• Practice and learn a foreign language with native speakers of the tongue
• Discuss problems with other learners from far off locations
• Invite experts in a particular field to the virtual classroom and learn from them
• Expose themselves to other cultures and develop a more holistic global awareness
• Set up virtual trips to places of interest

Skype and Google Hangout are great tools to create a connected classroom. They stand out for a number of reasons:

• They are completely free to uset is easy to set them up and you do not need any in-depth technical knowledge to operate them
• They are web-based and don’t require software installation
• You can do both video and text chat on them 
• They offer group calling services
• Hangout videos and Skype calls can be recorded and shared with anybody
  Let us take a look at a practical way in which we can use Google Hangout and Skype to create a connected classroom

The Mystery Hangout/Skype

A Mystery Hangout/Skype is an educational classroom game where students from different parts of the country get to meet each other on Skype or through Hangout video and get to ask each other questions about each other's locations. The aim of this game is to help the students guess the location of their peers’ class. In the process, they get to practice a number of academic skills like web searching, speaking, note taking, writing and a lot more.

This activity is suitable for children of any age group and can also be used to teach subjects like geography, history, mathematics, languages and science.  There are various ways in which you can go about selecting the class to partner with. For instance, you can use the Hashtag #mysteryskype or go to this page to find out more about the different classes that are featured there. If you want to organize a Mystery hangout for your class, you can check Google Plus’ Mystery hangout Community. If you find a class that you want to connect with, get in touch with its teacher and set up a meeting. But before you get started with the Mystery Hangout/Skype class, make sure that your students are adequately prepared. Here are a few handy tips to get them ready for their first connected learning experience:

• Make sure that your students fact check the information that they are going to provide in their answers. They can use the internet to look up information on their geographical location, the population of the city they live in, the languages they speak, the historical monuments, their city’s economic mainstay and more. 

• If you want to connect with classes that are in a different time zone, you need to know the time differences between both the locations. You can use the following tools to overcome the problem:

• Online conversion 
• Meeting planner 
• World clock 

If you want your students to make the most of the time they spend connecting with their guest class, make sure that you assign each one of them a specific task to carry out. Some of the roles include – greeters (the students who will greet the guests when they connect), the questioner (students who pose the questions), note takers (students who are entrusted with taking detailed notes) and photographers (students who are entrusted with taking pictures during the call). If you want a more detailed web resource with a list of tasks that you can assign to your students, check out this page.