MET Blog of Louise Thomson

Having access to this toolkit has been particularly helpful for me.  Since I teach in a F2F environment I don’t have alot of call to utilize online communication tools.  The ability to try out a few of these tools has shown me that there are a few applications in my classroom where they could be utilized. 

Inspired by this toolkit I spent a couple of lab periods at the end of the year using iChat at school.  We are a Mac district so this is readily available to me.  What I found useful was the ability to utilize this tool in the lab so that students could collaborate without physically sitting next to each other.  This not only made for an engaging experience for my students but also worked as a management tool to help keep the noise level down in the lab.  This served two functions.   First, it allowed the kids to focus on their work without distraction.  Second, and best of all, the absence of noise for a short period of time for their beleaguered teacher!  : )

The downside of this experience was also a management one however!  Thank goodness for Remote Desktop software!!

The unit that I am creating in my Moodle course site is one that will focus on perspective.  Students will examine the gold rush in the Cariboo from the perspective of different groups who were present and will not just look at life as it pertained to the miners.  I chose to have the students work in a forum that would utilize a jigsaw strategy wherein each pair of students would learn about their person and then teach the other groups about that person by introducing themselves in-role. 

I wanted make sure that the other students read and thought about the experiences of these major gold rush characters so I have required them to respond to each of the other group’s characters in-role as well.  I have provided some suggestions for how they might go about this but think that this format will provide a lot of opportunity for students to display some critical thinking skills.

I also fully intend to create my own character, fictional or otherwise, and participate in the forum myself.  This will allow me to ask students questions and try to challenge their knowledge of the time period.  The asynchronous aspect of the forum environment will allow students the time to go and research the answer to any questions they may be given.

From the teaching perspective I feel that using a forum will allow me to easily track participation as each group will have its own thread.  Groups failing to participate will be obvious. 

In addition to this I would also like to have the students create blogs in their own voice as another way to demonstrate their learning.  I have been unable to figure out how to set up a blog in Moodle yet so I will continue on with my quest!

***An update to this post…For now, I have given up on the blog as discussion with fellow classmates and my online research shows that an internal blog format is something that Moodle is still working on.  My school district is quite restrictive about allowing the students to access blogging sites so I have chosen to insert a chat into the course shell instead. 

As part of the Gold Rush unit my students will be reading the novel Cariboo Runaway.  The chat format will be one that I think the students will find engaging as it is something they have not experienced in the classroom.  It will be conducted during class time in the lab and will test the students understanding of the novel as well as their ability to respond to higher-order thinking questions that relate the fictional characters to real characters from the Gold Rush that they have studied. 

The chat function may be limited by the fact that students who have a better understanding of the novel may monopolize the discussion so accountability will have to be built in by requiring a number of contributions from all students.  Another limiting factor may be the typing issue but they have spent enough time on All The Right Type haven’t they?