Skype in the classroom

The future of education is global.

Join a community of innovators! Skype in the classroom allows you to collaborate on exciting projects with educators around the world. Share your own teaching ideas with the community and search for ideas or speakers on any subject. With over 1,700 projects already online, you’ll find unlimited inspiration to refresh your lessons.

Skype in the classroom is a fast, fun way to create exciting and memorable lessons for your students. Join thousands of teachers already using the service, and get immediate access to dozens of new cultures, languages and ideas.

It’s very simple. Once you’ve created a profile to set out your interests, specialties and location, you can set up your own projects and appeal for classes, partner teachers or guest speakers and, if you like, offer your own services to others. Browse through projects or search by keyword to quickly find a good match. When you’ve found someone you’d like to connect with, you can add them as a Skype contact. There’s also a directory of resources to help you share inspiring videos, links and tips.

Getting started:

There is a lot you can do on Skype in the classroom, but it’s worth noting that this is a community for education-related endeavours, not personal or commercial projects. Once you’ve created a profile with some details about yourself, you can begin to create your own projects. Within minutes you’ll be sharing your thoughts with the network and finding partner classes, teachers and guest speakers.

Many people find Skype in the classroom useful for language teaching – imagine the difference between a textbook and a real-time face-to-face chat with a Skype penpal. For the same reason, music lessons and reading groups work very well on here. You can Skype individuals (students, teachers, professionals and inspiring individuals) or entire classes. This service is open your all ideas; the only limit is your imagination!

System requirements:

• Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit versions supported)
• DirectX v9.0 or above
• Processor: At least 1-gigahertz (GHz)
• Memory: 256 megabytes (MB) of Ram

To operate Skype in the classroom a microphone and a webcam is also needed.