Interactive Communicative Tools

What three key concepts or ideas did you learn?

• Interactive tools have the potential to simply increase the pace of questioning without allowing students enough time to think through their responses and to lower the depth of questioning by asking for fact recall rather than application and analysis of the facts. I need to be careful that I am not using interactive tools just to say I am using technology and ignore solid teaching principals. I see how this danger can be true, but my experience in the classroom is that interactive tools not only allow for greater participation and a lively and fun environment, but also require students to defend their answers and interact with each other when they disagree. (See my examples of interactive activities later in the post.)
• The reflection questions on typical classroom interactions are great "Check Points" for me to use to evaluate the thinking time I allow during my lessons and the depth of understanding I am asking for in my questions. For instance, I am reminded that I should be paying attention to length of my students responses, time allowed for discussion between students, and reflection time after discussions. In general, I think I do take these questions into consideration, but not always consciously. A good principle that I took from these questions is that the interactions I set up in my classroom should be a good balance of quick Q and A and more in depth reflection.
• As far as interactive white boards specifically, I liked the activity where students brainstormed ideas for solving a multiplication problem by writing them on the screen and then comparing their ideas with a more standard method. I think this is a great way to achieve student participation while still raising the bar for thinking - touching the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy - creating solutions, analyzing different methods, evaluating which method is best. I can see doing a similar lesson with sentence structure - giving students a poorly written sentence, asking them to revise in their own style, defend their word choice and syntax, and compare the options suggested by the class.

Do interactive communication tools lead to interactive learning? Why or why not?
I think that interactive communication tools can lead to interactive learning, but the teacher needs to use the tools in a way to create an interactive lesson and environment. For example, a wiki is definitely a great interactive tool, but is not always used for interaction. For some teachers, a wiki is simply an easy way to create a website to share information about a course such as a syllabus and homework assignments. They may choose not to use it to its full potential for student interaction where students actually create their own pages, edit each other’s work, or collaborate with peers to build a page together. Similarly, as discussed in class and in the article, white boards are often used more as projector screens than as interactive devises for both the teacher and the students. But clearly, as we have explored in class, smart boards are great for student participation when they write directly on the screen or navigate through websites. Teachers need to be taught how to use these tools to their full potential and need to explore them to find applications for their own classrooms.

How can educators be sure to use interactive communication tools to their best potential? List and describe three ideas.

Tablet PC – A tablet PC is very similar to a Smart board, but it is a lap top that allows the user to write on and control the screen with a tablet pen, or in some cases, a finger. Using an LCD projector, the images on the Tablet PC can be projected on to the screen in the classroom. Teachers can use this interactive tool in a variety of ways. Some of my favorites in my own classroom are as follows:

• Annotating (marking up) a text of a short story or novel to identity patterns, to analyze the text, and to visualize the reader’s “thinking process” while reading the text. I usually ask for volunteers to use the pen to record the thoughts and ideas of the class. Then we use the annotations to draw conclusions about the text - both form/structure and content.
  
• Completing grammar exercises, labeling parts of a sentence, paragraph, or essay, and editing and revising writing. Again, I usually ask for student volunteers to use the pen, or for exercises, I have students come up one problem at a time.
  
• Taking notes. Rather than writing on the board, I set up charts in a word document, and either I or some of my students write the notes directly on the computer. I would like to try using inspiration next year so that students can move the notes around to show how they relate to each other.

Using the tablet PC not only allows more students to participate in the lessons, but they LOVE the novelty of “writing on the computer.” I love that students actually fight each other over who gets to do the next grammar problem!!

Wikis - A wiki is a website that anyone (or anyone who has permission if private) can edit. They are very easy to use – very much like using basic word features – and allow for students to interact with each other in the classroom, at home, and even across oceans! One of my colleagues used a wiki to write letters back and forth between our school and a school in another country. Some of my favorite assignments are as follows:

• Researching the background of the Arthurian legend and then creating “book club” pages where students discussed different Arthur stories with my freshmen English classes.
• Creating Facebook-style profiles of the characters in Great Expectations in my freshman English classes
• Collaborating on country research with my freshman AAL academic skills classes.
• Designing a web presence for a virtual company with freshman AAL academic skills classes

Interactive polls and surveys. I have recently begun playing with different free survey tools to ask my students questions via the internet. Below is a poll I am going to use with my students at the beginning of next year.

Though this poll does not really assess great deapth of understanding, it gives me a base by which to structure other lessons. Polls can be structured in ways to assess more depth of understanding when desired. Free survey tools to check out are found on the following links:
http://polls.zoho.com/
http://www.polldaddy.com/
http://www.mystudiyo.com/