Teachers spend a lot of time reinforcing guidelines for participating
in whole class discussions. This system of one speaker and respectful listening
is necessary in many learning situations, but inevitably involves students waiting
to share ideas and ask questions. In whole class situations this leads to
frustration for some students as they wait to voice “burning” questions or
ideas and allows others to sit back without engaging. While I use non technological methods to provide students
with increased opportunities to respond (response cards,
mini whiteboards and talk-to-your-partner), these methods do not allow the teacher
to capture and make visible all responses.
My experiences with teaching via Web Conferencing (Collaborate)
introduced me to the benefits of the chat function and shared whiteboard as spaces where all students are able to contribute, answering each other’s questions building on
the ideas of others and actively engaging in the activity or presentation rather
than being passive recipients. An overview of whole class thinking
( in real time) , also provides a basis for further discussion and supports higher
order thinking through analysis and reflection. This experience inspired me to explore
backchannelling in regular classrooms (Byrne, 2013).
While the following back channelling tools are available
on desktop devices, accessing them from a mobile device allows them to be easily
utilised in a regular classroom as part of everyday learning activities.
Learning Activity
: Students pose meaningful
questions about the life of Indigenous Australians before and after colonisation.
Apps/ Native functions :
Access to Padlet/TodaysMeet through Safari App, wireless connection
In this artefact I have used Padlet as a tool for whole
class brainstorming as part of the Australian Curriculum History where students
are required to pose questions about life for Indigenous and Torres Strait
Islander peoples both before and after colonisation. The Padlet could be kept
open throughout a series of lessons. The free form layout option of Padlet makes it particularly useful in this
situation, as questions can be grouped and re grouped according to different
criteria.
TodaysMeet is another backchannelling tool that is
very simple to use and is easily accessed through Safari on an iPad. TodaysMeet places posts in chronological order and automatically tags entries with
the name of the contributor and time they were entered. Silvia Tolisano (2009)
discusses the practicalities of using this back channelling tool in her blog
post and outlines useful guidelines for supporting students to contribute
positively.
Learning Activity : Shared reading. Analysing the language used by
author’s to portray characters, analysing the development of a character
throughout a quest novel (i.e. Rowan of Rin).
Apps/ Native functions :
Access to class Edstudio ( chat function)
through Safari App, wireless connection.
I am very aware of the security and safety issues that
are a part of working with young students in a school setting. The Learning
Place is continually upgrading to provide similar capabilities for interaction
as open access tools (such as TodaysMeet or Padlet). I recently joined a Web Conference presented
by Stephanie Hendy around backchannelling in the Learning Place (Hendy, 2014) and discovered
the chat function within EdStudios. This tool has several advantages that make
it particularly suitable for classroom use. The setting options allow the
teacher control over when students can access the chat, as well as functions
that may be distracting for students such as emoticons or font and colour and banned
words/ banned contributors function.
The purpose of the shared reading is to develop an
understanding of how an author portrays a character over time and how that
character changes throughout the book. EdStudio chat enables the teacher to
easily create new chats (for each chapter of the book) and organise these on one page. Chat
transcripts can be downloaded as pdfs and printed for comparison and discussion
or provided as notes for students who were absent. Chats from earlier chapters
can easily be viewed beside chats from later chapters to support discussions
that compare and contrast.
Opportunities to transform learning
Because Padlet,
TodaysMeet and EdStudio Chats all provide access to real time communication
regardless of location, there is scope for the transformative use of
backchannelling by including students and teachers from other locations. Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano (2010) provides an
inspiring example of this in her simultaneous use of Skype ( on mobile devices)
and backchannelling to make connections between her own class and students in
countries all over the world through online “ visits” .
Learning Activity : Explaining
mathematical thinking during a math investigation ( patterns) and evaluating explanations.
Apps/
Native functions :
Socrative App ( student and teacher)
,wireless connection.
Socrative allows teachers to create and set quizzes that
provide students with immediate feedback. As well as share quizzes with other teachers. The results of quizzes can be organised by question or
student and accessed as pdf or Excel documents via email, download or Google
Drive. Teachers are able to collect and organise data around responses.
The idea for this activity came from a demonstration of
inductive teaching methods in mathematics I observed recently. The goal was for
students to discover the solution to a problem involving patterns. This lesson
involved whole class discussion as students shared their solutions and
discussed different ways of thinking about the problem. I noticed that students
were very engaged in forming their ideas but did not listen to, or build on the
contributions of their peers during discussions, preferring to share their own
idea even if it had previously been offered by someone else. I felt that the
immediate communication afforded by mobile technology might be useful in this
situation.
The activity uses the “quick question” option within
Socrative as a forum for sharing and evaluating responses. This option is
accessed through the teacher dashboard. It allows teachers to select anonymous/
named and single/ unlimited responses. Once responses have been collected
students are able to vote. The results of the vote can be displayed and used as
a basis for further discussion.
Using Socrative to share student ideas simultaneously would
allow all students to be heard and avoids the problem of quieter students being
overlooked. It also allows students to
pay attention to the discussion. Posting solutions anonymously removes the
fear of being incorrect, encourages risk taking and removes the risk of
embarrassing students when using the vote function to evaluate responses.
From my observation explaining their mathematical
thinking is also something many students find difficult. Viewing and evaluating
anonymous responses in later lessons would also support a change in focus, from
the methods used by students, to the quality of their explanations and use of
mathematical language.
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