Over the years, I had some great opportunities to travel, tour, and experience the world. As I posted previously, I will be headed to Turkey for an amazing experience touring the metropolis of Istanbul and the rural countryside of Turkey (that I am told will greatly resemble the South Dakota countryside). This time I board the plane to travel will be very different than I have ever experienced previously, because I will be waving good-bye to two very extraordinary influences in my life, my husband and daughter. It is only a short trip, and I cannot wait to be able to take fantastic trips like this with my family, but, until then, I have Skype.

This service will be able to connect me with my daughter and hubby while I am gone. Though if I wanted to call a cell phone or house phone I would need to purchase ‘Skype Credit’, if we are both at the computer, we can Skype for free! Now that I actually sat down and figured it out, I Skyped by friend Becky who attends graduate school in Swansea, Wales last night. We talked for about an hour– actually looking at each other! It was a great way to check out this service and my daughter sat on my lap for most of the conversation.

After looking into this I began thinking about how I could use Skype in my classroom…
Flat Classroom Skype, originally uploaded by superkimbo in BKK.

Here is a photo of some students in a Fifth grade classroom that I found on flickr. There is not a long story that accompanies the photo, but it does say that they are Skyping with students in Australia.

The implications for this in the classroom setting could be shattering! No longer do we have to assume what students from another school, state, or even country think– we could connect via Skype for a discussion! Imagine if I connect with a classroom in Turkey, and barring difficulties with time differences, we connect and discuss our opinions of the literary classic Beowulf. We could open our classroom up to the opinions of the world. This could also be particularily useful when analyzing bias in the media or during an election.

The possibilities are endless, but for now I will just work on being able to listen to my daughter laugh while I’m on the other side of the world.