For my activities, I have students going in to a Google Doc outside of Moodle and adding to a Wiki within. I went in to greater detail in my Intro Module post, as I completed the activity simultaneously, but I will recap my rationale briefly here.
In preparing my Grade 7’s for high school, my goal is to build them in to a collaborative team, a community of learners, which they can rely upon in and out of school. I chose to have them introduce themselves in Google Docs because it can be both a synchronous and asynchronous form of communication. If other students are in the document at the same time, they have the opportunity to communicate, very much like a chat room, on the sidebar of the document. They can see students typing in the document in real time. If they are alone in the documents, they can still make their changes and leave comments for others to review/resolve later. The goal of this particular activity is to have students familiarize themselves with this tool and its affordances. They will use it later on in groups to make notes on a chapter by dividing up the workload and sharing it in the documents. In this way, they can make more efficient use of time and dialogue about the sections to construct their knowledge and understanding of the material they read.
In addition, I have students contributing to a vocabulary Wiki within Moodle. This is strictly an asynchronous activity but all the students stand to benefit from the contributions of others. Students can add to the definition and expand on the learning by providing links the course material.
There are some concerns with you students working outside of Moodle in an area where a ‘chat’ feature is available to them but is not supervised or controlled by the teacher. This form of synchronous communication can be a great asset for adults but poses a potential security issue for underage users. The teacher could not monitor all interactions, but this might be mitigated by having a student ‘Code of Conduct’ for the virtual space. Security of Google Apps is an area that I will have to explore further.
