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help kids or die » Zoho Show + Skype + Student Presentation = Awesome

Last week, as my seniors were finishing up their classes, I had a student who’s grade was borderline and wanted to do an extra credit assignment to get her grade where she wanted it to be. It was based on a presentation that she had put together for another class.

Her presentation was on the conflict in Darfur, which has a multitude of connections to a Government class. Making what she was doing in her other class fit in to “my” class was easy. How she was going to present this information to me is where things got awesome.

She had put together a PowerPoint presentation. In most classes and in most cases this would have done the trick. I could have flipped through the presentation and got an understanding of what this young lady knew, but I was looking for something more.

First, I uploaded her presentation to ZohoShow. Then I gave her the rights to collaborate and present. Then I sent her an invitation to the presentation. What this allowed us to do was look at the same part of the presentation at the same time; she on her computer me across town on mine.

Then I called her using Skype. I know I knocked Skype for the problems I’m (still) having setting up multiple accounts. As a single user though, I love Skype. In fact, I have a Vonage softphone that I pay for each month that I never use because Skype works so much better. But I digress.

I called her home phone using Skype, she had the presentation up in Zoho Show on her computer, flipped through the slides as she presented and I was able to get a much deeper understanding of this student’s knowledge. As she presented I asked her a few questions that got her to show her understanding of her American Government class and the conflict she was telling me about. Aha! A direct connection to her government class. Borderline grade no more. Cha-ching!

Here’s what I love about this: There are pay programs that can do this, notably Elluminate and Centra, but I was able to this for free. Well, almost. At 2 cents a minutes in Skype, by 17 minutes, the whole thing cost me 34 cents.

I spoke with the student at graduation and she said at first she was a little nervous, but after a little bit she got more comfortable. What I didn’t know, is that she had the call on speaker and was actually giving the presentation to both her mother and me. I think that would be enough to make anyone nervous.

Can you imagine a traditional classroom environment where both parent and teacher can see what their child/student knows in real-time? Me neither.

The changing face of (online) education is truly awesome. Not to mention a lot of fun.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 3:48 pm and is filed under online learning, presentations, teaching, teaching tools. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.