The Relevant Tools in the VLE
Electronic written communication in all its forms from sms and instant messaging to producing a formal text allows participants to communicate in totally different ways from the face to face situation.
A network supported classroom can give the learners and the teacher greater choice both in what they work with and how they work with it.
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• It extends the classroom walls by allowing the teacher and learners to work on a topic or theme together both inside and outside the physical classroom and outside the constraints of the 45 minute “lesson,” using the tools which are available within the VLE.
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• It extends the face to face classroom in the sense that contact and communication with the outside world are easy.
1. Chat
Chat takes place in real time and has the drawback that everyone taking part has to be online simultaneously. It favours those with good keyboard skills and encourages participants to think quickly. Discussion in chat sessions therefore has a tendency to be rather superficial, but it can be a very useful tool for a brainstorming session where ideas are simply thrown about before going on to more structured work like a forum discussion or a longer shared or individual text.
Chat is discussed here
2. Forum
A forum discussion takes place over a period of time, so that participants can be online and contribute at different times. It may be used by a group or a whole class for brainstorming at an initial stage on a particular theme, but because it allows the participants to reflect before answering others it is a useful tool for encouraging the development of ideas. There are a variety of ways of organizing forum discussions, the two commonest being a purely linear one where each posting follows the one before in a long list, and one where the forum is divided into a new thread each time a new topic comes up.
Forums are discussed here.
3. Email
We have found this most useful for individual communication between learners and between individual learners and teacher. It is for example useful for “talking” to “lurkers” and encouraging them to be more active. While a teacher in a face to face class would never normally ask a learner outright why they are not taking part in a discussion, it would be quite natural for a teacher to make such an enquiry within the “privacy” of an email exchange.
A very specific use of email is in the creation of “dialogue journals”, an idea originally we came across in Mark Warschauer. A dialogue journal is dialogue or an exchange of emails between teacher and learner inviting the learner to reflect on their learning and with the teacher commenting on the reflections.
Emails are discussed here
4. Shared document
Some VLEs allow the creation of so-called shared documents. These are documents to which a defined group of students have both reading and writing access. Since the teacher sets up the document, she also has access.
Interactive Writing. The VLE as a tool in promoting process based writing activity
This closed or virtual learning environment makes it possible to collect and store student work so that it may be process-based rather than simply product-based. The idea of students being involved in a process rather than simply producing a product gives greater opportunities for creativity and for the student to have a greater feeling of ownership for the work. It also means that the teacher or moderator can be closely involved in the production process, thereby making the whole learning situation much more interactive. This is a radical change, based of course on the principles of process writing, from the more “traditional” situation where the teacher sets a writing task, the student completes it more or less willingly, and hands it in. The teacher corrects it and hands it back and the student probably never looks at it again, and has therefore not developed any very useful creative or writing skills in the process.
The student writing in a VLE is able to produce a first draft which may then be read and commented on by the teacher and not least by fellow students. She can then rewrite and improve the text and this process can go through several stages until it is published in its final form.
This means that there is a community of readers and writers for every piece of text produced and the student is genuinely challenged and is not simply producing a finished product to please the teacher.
Interactive writing is discussed here.
