start my free trial
Book a demo
Activity
Ongoing engagement

Studio Visits

Mia Zamora

Mia Zamora

Bring external voices into your classroom with a studio visit — an informal discussion with one or two guest professionals who share insights into their work, creative process, or professional journey.

Share:

Activity feature image
Tech needed: Video conferencing
Duration: Variable
Student preparation: None
Educator preparation: Moderate

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

Bring in external speakers into your classroom via a ‘studio visit’, an informal discussion with one or two external guests. Visits can take place in person or virtually, depending on what works best for your context.

USEFUL FOR

Enriching your classroom with the practical experience of experts in the field, and encouraging students to have informal, open discussions with these experts, giving them access to dig deeper into how someone’s article or video or practice came about.

PREPARATION

  • Inviting guest(s) and setting time for meeting.
  • Creating a mechanism for people to sign up to join.

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Set up a mutual time in which you and your invited guest can speak with a small group or your class about shared interests and their perspective on topics you are covering.
  2. Confirm with the guest that there is no preparation needed, that the time will be sent chatting somewhat informally about topics of mutual interest. Let your Studio Visit guest know the time frame you have in mind for the engagement (typically 30-60 minutes).
  3. Request a brief bio from your guest or a link to a bio description and/or some work they are engaged in, so you can create a brief announcement of the event. The Studio Visit can be more private (only for your students in class and unrecorded) or it can be public with both students and open participants, shared on the open web). *Please be sure to confirm these details and request permission from your Studio Visit guest when extending the invitation.
  4. Create a sign up sheet (google form or doc with name & email addresses) in order to confirm who will be attending the SV.
  5. Send hangout link invitation to all participants a few days before the scheduled SV, indicating they should arrive a few minutes early in order to make sure their set up is working.
  6. If you plan to record and archive SV, be sure to indicate to everyone in the hangout when the recording starts and stops. As a follow up, distribute the link of the recorded SV and post to your course materials archive.

DURATION

A studio visit can be as short or as long as you like, but 30-60 minutes is probably ideal. It will take some time to set it up, such as inviting the guest and finding a time that is suitable for both the guest and your students, signing students up to join (if it is not during class time), etc. Avoid post-production editing if you record it.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

Any video conferencing tool that allows you to invite external guests from outside your institution will work.

  • You may choose to record or not to record, depending on the value of the discussion, how important it is for your class (and whether students can all make it or not as it is probably difficult to have it during class time).
  • You may choose to keep it private within your own classroom, or allow other people from around the world to join and make it an intercultural conversation.
  • Using something like Zoom that livestreams and records to YouTube can be helpful if you want to make the recordings public, and you won’t have to spend time uploading a recording later.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Do you have any suggestions? Please share them in the comments below.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Sample studio visits can be found via the links below:

Do you have an activity that you would like to suggest?

Submit An Activity

Do you have feedback or suggestions?

Report

Harassment or bullying behavior
Contains mature or sensitive content
Contains misleading or false information
Contains abusive or derogatory content
Contains spam, fake content or potential malware

Block Member?

Please confirm you want to block this member.

You will no longer be able to:

  • See blocked member's posts
  • Mention this member in posts
  • Invite this member to groups
  • Message this member
  • Add this member as a connection

Please note: This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.

Report

You have already reported this .