Connecting+With+a+Partner+Class

//**AIM OF THE SESSION:**// To be able to use Tok Box video messaging to connect with a partner class

Tok Box is a video chat application. With Tok Box you can:
 * Sign up free
 * Create your own profile, add your picture and change your privacy settings to control which emails you send
 * Add friends from your email address book if you use Yahoo or Gmail
 * Send someone a video message
 * Start a video conference with several people
 * Have an IM (instant messaging) conversation with someone
 * Use video and or text chat as part of the video conference
 * Share a Flickr image, Youtube video or Slideshare presentation in the video conference
 * Work on a document with the people in your video conference
 * Use GTalk within TokBox

This video tutorial will give you a brief introduction to TokBox:

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TASK 1:

Now that you know a bit about what TokBox can do and a bit about what it looks like, it's time to get your hands dirty and figure out HOW to get it all working.
 * Sign up for your own account - then go and write your username on the whiteboard so we can all see what each others' usernames are and find each other. Find the rest of us by searching the TokBox directory. My username is 'jessmcculloch.' Try to find me first.
 * Send a video email to someone else in the room. In your message describe the collaborative project you are designing.
 * Reply to a message you receive, commenting on someone else's ideas for their project.

TASK 2:

Now that we are all in an using TokBox, we are going to have a group web conference. I will start the conference and invite you all in. We will talk about your project ideas and hopefully use what some of you have created to show as part of the conference.

Other chat applications you may be interested in exploring:

Skype Seesmic Eyejot Google Chat

//**USING TWITTER TO CONNECT**// If you are really confident with Tok Box, you might like to try signing up to Twitter, learning about some of its features and thinking about how it could be used in a collaborative project: One reason Twitter has great potential in the language classroom because:it involves short messages making it a great medium for writing single sentences. Hashtags (#) can then be added to messages to make searching responses to questions easy. For example, the question 'ni xihuan shenme yundong?' might be posted with a possible response being 'wo xihuan to zuqiu' #yundong. This tag at the end (#yundong) is the search term that can be entered in to twitter, so all of the posts with #yundong will then show up.That will all make more sense once you have a good look around the Twitter site.

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Check out this very useful presentation with some ideas for using Twitter in the classroom. This blog post, Twitter in the classroom: 10 useful resources is very handy too.