Skype4eflclasses

[erichagley]

To the person(s) concerned. I would be grateful if you could pass on the
following information to any people who might be interested. Please post it
to any EFL/ESL list that you think would be interested. Kind regards, Eric
Hagley

I would like to get a lot of other EFL teachers from around the world
involved on my site. I have set up a site using the brilliant moodle script
at
http://skype4.eflclasses.org/



What is the site about? I’m unsure if others have heard of Skype. It is
free software that, in simple terms, makes your computer into a telephone.
It can be downloaded from

http://www.skype.com/

You can talk to anyone in the world for free if you both have the software
and a microphone. Messenger software has some similarities but has various
problems (incompatible across systems, advertising, Microsoft etc) that
Skype overcomes.

I want my students, in class and afterwards, to be able to communicate with
other EFL students (and perhaps native speakers) from other countries. I
would hope teachers will be able to work with the teacher from the other
country in real time so that we could get our students on similar paths and
prepared to speak with each other. With skype you can have up to 5 people on
a conference call at the same time so discussions could take place even if
class numbers didn’t match up perfectly.

There are numerous email exchange sites out there. This will be (possibly)
the first proper exchange using oral communication. (If there are others
there, please let me know!) Ideally, students in a class on Monday morning
in Korea could link up with a class in Japan and the students could exchange
ideas together in English. The time zones are the same so there should be
no problems. To avoid time zone problems, if everyone uses GMT to talk time
then the opportunities to link up will be greater still. Many teachers
perhaps think that talking to native speakers would be
better. Sometimes this is so. But as the number of ESL and EFL students now
greatly outnumbers the total number of native speakers I feel it is also
essential to get these students talking to each other.



The more teachers looking for partner classes the better! I hope that skype
gets our students talking to each other.

[jonathan davis]

Hi

A friend was telling me about Skype only yesterday. If I get the college permission to download it, then I would like to use it to contact other students.

I have 12 students, in Peterborough, England. They are mostly Portuguese and Polish.

We use computers on Mondays from 14.00 hours GMT to 15.30, but we could go on an hour earlier aswell, if necessary.

Jonathan Davis

[lucieJane]

Eric you are brilliant.
That's just what the world needs.
I've got 4 beginners and 3 intermediates that want to join in.

How do I get started? Who arranges the courses? Can we have themes 'talking about your family' etc.

We're here Mon 10-12, Weds 14-17, Thurs 14 - 17

My skype name is luzieJay but I must admit I haven't managed to speak to anyone yet so I don't know for sure if VoIP gets thru the firewall and of course i'm not always at the computer (teaching english involves a lot of jumping around)