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1: forum and chat in practice in a school classroom
06/03/08 12:24 AM
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I am posting on behalf of a research team in the Institute of Education - London. We are developing interactive activities to help students with mathematical generalisation (patterns, rules etc.). We are thinking of integrating our tools in LAMS to help teachers use them easily and to benefit from the collaboration tools.

We are interested in the opinion of members of this forum who have used LAMS in practice, particularly with 11-14 year old students.

- Have you used the forum and the chat in practice?
- Does it make sense, to use these tools in a classroom since students can communicate anyway with each other, synchronously? Is there a benefit for the teacher?
- Do you have any examples of sequences where forum,chat are particularly useful? And/Or have you written a summary or a report about students' use of these sequences?

Thanks in advance,

Manolis Mavrikis
Research Officer
London Knowledge Lab
http://www.migen.org
http://www.lkl.ac.uk

Posted by Manolis Mavrikis

2: Re: forum and chat in practice in a school classroom
In response to 1 06/03/08 12:50 AM
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Hi Manolis

I did a fair bit of work on online discussions using LAMS a couple of years ago. Although the ages of the students in one project was above the ages of the students you are dealing with (18 yrs +)and the other was below (5-10 yrs).

Interestingly however, the issues seemed to be almost the same with both these groups so both these studies may still be of interest to you. The short answer is that our experience is that kids of all ages seem to love to "talk" to each other online and they are very comfortable doing it - even when they are all in the same room. I would certainly recommend using Chat in particular if you are planning a real time discussion.

If you want to read more, we wrote up the first project in "Teaching with technology: Using online chat to promote effective in-class discussions" and this can be found at:
http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney06/proceeding/pdf_papers/p17.pdf

The paper discussing the second project was published in the UK in Snapshot magazine. I am happy to send you a copy of that one too if you want it.

Regards, Leanne Cameron

Posted by Leanne Cameron

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3: Re: Re: forum and chat in practice in a school classroom
In response to 2 06/05/08 03:29 AM
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Thanks Leanne,

I read the articles they are really interesting and answer a lot of our questions. Especially the Snapshot article with the teacher's comments.

Are these sequences available? Also, I was wondering if anyone has ever written more details (e.g. analysed transcripts) of students' discussions.

Perhaps its too much to ask but if someone is using LAMS as we speak and has a class where students are expected to contribute to discussions I would love to see how this works in practice (e.g. see the outcome of the discussions)?

Manolis

Posted by Manolis Mavrikis

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