Communication
Synchronous Tool: The Chat Room
My Moodle site currently has two chat rooms “Chatting with Mrs. Hay” and “Chatting with Classmates”. Real time conversations are important in establishing a sense of community, a sense of connection.
“Chatting with Mrs. Hay” is scheduled Monday through Friday 9-9:30am as a time that students can drop in unannounced to get help. Students are informed that transcripts from this chat room are available for everyone in the course to see. This allows classmates to scroll through chats to find discussions on topics they’re having issues with as well. Setting up this solution center as a chat room rather than as a discussion forum allows for real time conversation.
“Chatting with Classmates” is a place for classmates to meet and help each other. As I develop further modules, this will be the place where groups will meet to work on collaborative projects. Students are informed that only the teacher is able to view the transcripts. The rationale for this setting is that groups will be able to work without concern that other groups can “see” their progress. This simulates face-to-face collaborative projects where groups work unto themselves. The teacher can view transcripts just as they would monitor group discussion in a classroom setting.
These chat rooms have limited functionality in a math classroom. Before the site has it’s final evaluation, I hope to find out how to link to Elluminate Live!, replacing “Chatting with Mrs. Hay”, so that students and I can use the whiteboard feature.
Both chat rooms have been tested and are functioning.
Asynchronous Tool: The Discussion Forum
“Mrs. Hay’s Announcements” is the default main news forum for the site and “General Course Questions” is the forum for students to post their “where do I find ___?” and “when is ___ due?” types of questions and is set up as a “standard forum for general use”. Forums allow posts and information to be organized by thread. Being able to quickly post and search queries quickly is one key to reducing student frustration in on-line learning experiences. For these purposes, the discussion forum doesn’t have any significant drawbacks.
As I develop the course modules, I would like to create reflection questions using the “Q and A” setting. By posting a question and requiring a student to respond before they can see classmates’ responses, a student must take responsibility for their learning. This feature may also reduce “lurking” as well as the tendency of some students to synthesize classmates’ responses.
Reflection
Using chat and discussion as two communication tools seems fairly standard procedure; every on-line course I’ve taken has had these two features. I like how the two features compliment each other – one allows for instantaneous communication albiet only at certain times while the other allows students to pause and post reflective thoughts. I would like to incorporate a wiki as well, but knowing my intent is to incorporate this site into my face-to-face classroom I haven’t thought far into into the modules to see how it could best be incorporated. Perhaps there will be a wiki as well :). Implementing the tools was straightforward – no significant issues – just a case of playing around with settings!
Cheers, Katie.
A Post-Script
Ok, so I originally thought that the Communication Tools assignment due last Sunday night was the same as the activity described in the module but now I’m not so sure since the questions regarding the rationale are different from those in the assignment. I may well be out to lunch (I will be soon, anyway!), but just to make sure I’ve got my bases covered … here goes!
I have developed a group task designed to bring together all the concepts covered in the course for review purposes. Each small group is assigned one chapter from the text and has the task of creating one wiki page dedicated to that chapter (I have created a page for each chapter ahead of time – they have to fill in the content). Each page will have the following sections/headers:
- Section 1: a glossary of new vocabulary
- Sections 2 through ~5 (depends on the chapter): 1 easy, 1 medium, and 1 hard question for each section (so about 12 questions in all). Some questions can come from the text, quizzes or worksheets – you do not need to make up all of the questions from scratch. Each section of the chapter needs its own “section”/header on the wiki page.
- Last Section: Answer Key
Groups are encouraged to check in with me often to make sure they’re on the right track. Under future development will be a “Wiki – Help Me!” resource under Communication Tools on the Home
The wiki allows students to clarify and solidify their concepts by having to articulate their understanding to the group, to gain experience with technology and to work as part of a group. I have started playing around with the “Quiz” feature to design a way for group members to evaluate the contributions of each (very rough right now!)
Since the students have already learned the material, the asynchronous nature of the wiki grants students time to reflect on their learning and time to create a meaningful product. I like that I can observe each group’s progress on the wiki. The reduced number of features of this wiki (compared to Mediawiki, for example) appropriately streamlines the development process for grade 8 students.Katie.