Online chatting for schools

"Chatting It Up Online" by Pamela Livingston

In this article Mrs. Livingston, a third grade teacher at an all boys school at Chestnut Hill Academy, organized a live video chat with an author that her class was reading at the time. The author was Mary Pope Osborne who wrote the Magic Treehouse series. The chat was through Random House Children's Media Group and Talk City, Inc. Mrs. Livingston and other third and second grade teachers jumped at this opportunity and signed up for The classes submitted questions that were interesting and relevant to the author. The teachers overlooked the questions and submitted them to the company. Heavy planning before the chat happened to make sure the school and technical equipment worked together so nothing would interrupt the chat while it was going on. As aspects everything went great and the Internet chat was a huge success for the teachers and students. Teachers found that the chat was much more satisfying to the students than traditional writing a letter to the author and then waiting four months for a response. This way the students can see the person in real time and have their questions answered in a much more timely manner. With this experiment so successful this school and others will start finding new ways for their students to come interested in reading. this interesting way to enhance students' reading.

In my classroom students will have the opportunity as these boys did to have internet chats with authors and famous peolpe who are willing to talk to studnets. Having learned the material first studnets can understand the information more clearly when going into a internet chat. Doing the lesson plan before hand will give my students the upper hand and gain more knowledge than studnets who do not. Having this type of technology in the classroom students can find ways they might learn better than with traditional teaching techniques. Helping others to gain this knowledge is also a great trait to have in a students' character. Also, parents of my students will be very happy and pleased that their son or daughter is having such a unique and interesting experience at school. Some parents might want to find other ways through technology to enhance their child's performance which makes them a better student and ultimately a better person.

The NESTS for this artcle is NETS.S: 4; NESTS.T: II, III.