Integrating forums into teaching activities
We see using forums as part of the way discussion and work with tasks and projects is organised in a student group or class. Sometimes the discussion will be spoken, sometimes instead of speaking students may be put into groups and given a forum topic or task to do within a time frame – in class, elsewhere at school/college, at home. Alternatively, students may be given (or set up for themselves in the VLE) a forum in which to work together on a joint theme or project.
Integrating forums into course evaluation
Students’ understanding of their own learning processes has become an integrated part of many areas of education in Norway. Forums, together with emails and interactive writing, have given us new ways of developing students’ learning and skills, and at the same time a way of knowing much more about how students’ learning and skills develop. It’s important for the forum texts, and other VLE texts, to be saved and collected within the VLE and for them to be used in evaluation, for example by being represented in student portfolios.
Our main example, the “Nispero Tree” forum, is a fairly long and wide-ranging discussion of a big, complex text, a novel. Here we would like to show three forum tasks which are simpler and which have a different purpose and genre.
1. Exchanging experiences: the language of storytelling and personal feelings
This is a very simple way of using a forum. Our example is from a course for European education students, taught in English. After working with the class on education in Norway and the students’ own countries, the tutor ended the session with her own memories of starting school, aged 5, in England. The follow-on forum was simply called “My first day at school”, and within an hour of finishing class all the students had contributed and also read each others’ contributions. The forum was not moderated. This type of task a collection of stories. It is rather similar to brainstorming, and like brainstorming could lead on to further tasks growing out of the contributions from four or five European cultures.
Click here to read extracts from the forum
2. Working together on a task: the language of socialising and negotiating
A forum discussion is an excellent tool for any group of students or teachers needing to communicate and work together over a period of time - for example in connection with teaching projects, research projects, or with study tasks. We should add here that most forum tools allow participants to link up or download documents into the forum so that they can be discussed by participants. (And if the forum has no facility for this, it is of course easier to download into another agreed area of the VLE).
Our example is a small part of a discussion that started a month into a combined online and face-to-face course for teachers and continued for several months in connection with course assignments. The forum was not moderated. The group are all lower secondary teachers. They had met at face-to-face meetings but lived in different areas of Norway.
The task discussed here was the use of two Easy Readers texts in their classes. They were expected to use the Readers in their teaching and report on this individually in the VLE.
Here they are starting to negotiate a way of working together, solve technical problems and share ideas. They link the discourse together by their choice of title/thread and by linking language such as names, use of questions, or “ I agree”.
They are also conscientiously practising their social skills in English!
3. Sharing ideas, suggestions for reading, and practical help between students and tutor.
This is a moderated complete discussion in an on-campus English course at Sør-Trøndelag University College. The course has a strong emphasis on bringing in books for children and young people. In this forum the moderator is very much part of the group.
The starting point is a “relay” in which students present their “bedside table book” – their own choice of text.
Click here to read extracts from the forum
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