Sunday, February 10, 2013

Week 3 Collaborative Communities

This was a very useful week in Collaborative Communities.  The class was discussing facilitating forum discussion and I was actually facilitating one for my AP European History class.  The class meets everyday f2f, but we do occasional forum discussion in order to get the benefits of that format and to give students the opportunity to sharpen online discussion skills.   The students will probably be discussing content online in college, even if they do not take an online class.

I directly applied elements of this week's forum discussions to an online forum discussion of excerpts from two readings by Sigmund Freud.  I used a response of main to craft a list of value added techniques in the assignment prompt.  As a result most students have been changing the subject line to reflect their ideas.  Here are the guidelines that I created.  Value added heading highlighted reflects discussion from Collaborative Communities:
I also submitted the prompt that I was using to the Blue Group and received helpful feedback that I will use to restructure the prompt for next time.  Lenore and Barb pointed out that the ideas in the prompt ran together.  I was attempting to provide multiple ways of accessing the readings, but they pointed out how this made the prompt potentially overwhelming for students.  I was able to clarify this in class with students, but this was a good lesson for me to learn because if I am teaching a fully online class I won't have this opportunity.

Finally I encountered similar scenarios to those discussed in the whole class discussion.  Despite the students all being native English speakers in an Advanced Placement 11th grade class, I did send a couple of reminder messages about spell checking and proofreading.  I used language similar to that suggested in the forum: be direct, specific, and positive.  Inspired by these reminders I am sending messages with feedback to as many students as I can.  The results so far are richer and deeper discussions.

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