For the past couple of years, classrooms around the country and the world have been participating in Mystery Skype calls. (You can read more about that here.) These "learning calls", as Silvia Tolisano likes to refer to them, are a great way to integrate technology into your lessons. By following Sylvia's suggestions for giving students jobs during the Mystery Skype calls they are all actively engaged in the process. As many of my PLN (personal learning network) friends have mentioned on Twitter, their students eagerly look forward to each Mystery call and beg to do more of them.
This year some of the teachers who have been doing Mystery Skype calls are now turning to a newer tool to use for video conferencing - Google Hangouts (GHO). While those of us that have tried GHO are excited about the improved quality of the calls and being able to conference with up to nine other classes at one time, it caused a dilemma. What do we now call these Mystery calls?
Well, tonight during a GHO with several others, we were working on a collaborative Google document for some projects we are working on. In the section where we had typed Mystery Skype Call, I changed it to Mystery Location Call (via Skype/GHO). Everyone else working on the doc liked the name change. So from now on I plan on using that wording when I write about or tweet about them - Mystery Location Call.
You can read about the first Mystery Location Call I did using GHO with Bill Krakower's class here. And below is the animoto video Bill made of our call.
Make your own photo slideshow at Animoto.
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I hope that others will agree to the change of the name from Mystery Skype Call to Mystery Location Call.
Have you done a GHO yet? How have you used GHO to connect with another class?
