The power of Skype never ceases to amaze me and I have loved doing Mystery Skypes for many years now. So as I started to plan for back to school I knew I wanted to participate once more in as many Mystery Skypes as possible, but I also wanted to try a different approach; the mystery Vox.
What is Voxer? It is a free walkie-talkie app that allows you to leave messages asynchronously or even a 15 second video if you would like to other users around the world. For more information or to download it, go here.
What is a Mystery Vox? Using the power of Voxer, students would take turn leaving clues throughout the day, checking in when they could in order to try to guess the geographical location of the other classroom. The questions still have to be in a yes or no format and students may still not google each other.
Why do this rather than Skype? For me it allows multiple classes to collaborate throughout the day trying to piece together where a class is. It also works around the timezone issues that can limit where we do a Mystery Skype with. Students will not have designated roles like they do in a Mystery Skype; anyone can guess, anyone can ask a question. I also love that students can digest the clues before they ask the next question. However, I still plan on doing lots of Mystery Skypes too!
How will this work? Sign up below on the form and then go to the form responses to find a match. Reach out and set up the day or week you would like to do this in.
To see the form responses and find someone, go here.
To see more about Mystery Skype, go here
What will this look like in my classroom? I will have a running list of clues and answers on the board, as well as questions asked. I will probably have students do this for me. I may even put it in a Google doc. I will alert kids to it throughout the day and ask them to come up with a question and an answer. I will use my own voxer account as I do not feel like setting up another one, right now anyway, and my students will be the ones leaving the messages. We will try to have it guessed within a day. I think that is really it.
Any further ideas?
Pernille Ripp 
I dig this idea, Pernille, largely because of the asynchronous-ness of it.
I’ve never been able to pull off Mystery Skypes simply because I teach 4 periods a day for 50 minutes. It never feels like enough time to make a Mystery Skype happen.
But if we did it in an asynchronous way, it could be great.
Thanks for the idea,
Bill