Innovation Profile 128

What in and what out?

If you were teaching a class, what would you want to inspire your students to do outside of the class? - Read? Experiment? Explore? Research? Create? Play? Question? Write? Discuss? Learn? Reflect on? Practice?

And would you just ask them to do it and hope that they would? Or would you provide resources, provide tools, structure and scaffold their work, enable them to collaborate, receive their comments, results and creations and/or prompt and support?

Compare a discussion held only in class with a discussion started in class and continued on an online forum. It is easy for teachers to create online forums if the school has a VLE which supports them - the SIMS .net Learning Platform being a good example. For more information on this see http://home.capitaes.co.uk/LearningPlatform/solution/index.asp.

A teacher leading a discussion in class, for 30 minutes, might manage to get contributions to the discussion from half the class. This would mean each could only get 2 minutes on average to express their view. Some students are reluctant to expose their views in class; some need more time to reflect on what they want to say; some may want to contribute but not get a chance because the debate moves on; some important contributions may be lost. And how many aspects of the topic will be covered? One? Or perhaps two?

Now imagine the discussion being introduced in class and continued online. Students who wish to push their views forward can do so, those that are more reflective know they can contribute later. A number of aspects of the discussion could be scoped in class, providing more chance that interest will be sparked with more students. Questions to stimulate thought can be made available online.

Online the quality of 'listening' can be higher; others' contributions can be re-read. Contributions can be constructed better; there is more time to work out what to say. Different threads of the discussion can proceed in parallel. If a student makes a link between two threads others can track back through the discussion to understand their thinking. No doubt you can think of other improvements too, during the online debate and perhaps in the quality of a concluding discussion back in class.

How much more thinking, reflecting and contributing will happen? How much more of the topic will be covered? What increase in the depth of the discussion will there be? Will this amount to double the learning activity that could happen just in class? If teachers measured this increased and improved learning activity they might discover the gain is even more, in attitudes as well as in learning.

The Capita Education Services Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company and a list of other Innovation Profiles connected with it.

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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