Mystery Hangouts: A Learning Experience
Hangouts (or Videocalls) in general, and Mystery Location Calls in particular, foster different types of learning for our students. To begin with, students acquire knowledge of the world by engaging in conversation with citizens of distant countries -that is to say, they access this information directly from the source, not by, say, reading a text produced by third parties.
Also, they learn by investigating about a topic/place, using all the resources available: consulting maps, Atlas, books, the Internet, as well as their teachers and their classmates. Furthermore, they get to practise the target language while learning the content, which in the context of EFL is of paramount importance.
Finally, students are able to come up with a specific product as a result of all the work carried out in the process: they guess the specific location of the other group, they are able to find out more details about the place, the school, etc, and then they publish their results and discoveries in different formats: writing a report, creating a poster (or Glogster online, which allows them to include videos and photos as well as text), etc. More importantly, they arrive at this product by working collaboratively during the whole process, which is a key strategy in 21st Century Learning Skills.
If all of this is not enough... students -and teachers, of course! - have FUN through the whole process, while exploiting all the skills and layers of learning mentioned above. All in all, this is a wonderful learning experience, not to be missed!
