Great tool to offer discussion and bring new voices into the classroom.

How I Use It

In process of teaching poetry, I had the opportunity to utilize a friend who was recently published. Her poetry was flooded with imagery and figurative language and the push to do the literary analysis is considering the context; historical, authorial, and cultural aspects of the poems itself. Many of my students would ask the question, "is this really what the poet was trying to say?" With a huge amount of these questions, I decided to give students my friend's poems and develop questions based on what they read and "quiz" the poet via Google Hangout. From the beginning of the period, students were able to listen to a live reading from my friend's apartment in San Francisco, California, and get answers to their burning questions, of did she really mean what she meant in her poem.
I had my account streaming from a Macbook Pro onto the Smartboard, so that my friend was blasted largely, then due to access, I had 4 students on iPads in different parts of the room on their own accounts--Not Google Apps for Ed accounts.

On the Horizon: I plan on trying to gain access to students in different parts of the world and doing a whole class discussion on a text/theme but in order for that to happen, I need a much bigger network and some other connections.