ICTs with Purpose and Guidelines

A recent experience with utilising a chatroom in moodle with a Year 11 class has left me reflecting on the key necessities of utilising ICTs in the classroom:

1. A purpose
2. Specific guidelines

I decided to use the chatroom (a basic feature of moodle) to explain the next phase of the course. The PURPOSE of this was to record the discussion and allow for students who are absent to look back on the conversation as well as those there (but who's brains were absent) to review the conversation later on.

The conversation went something like this:

• Teacher: Intro and questions based on next phase of curriculum
• Student1: Blah
• Student2: Blah Blah
• Student1: Beep
• Student2: Yadda Yadda
• Student3: OMG
• Student2: OMG?
• Student4: $*(#&*

...
and so it continued with a couple more teacher interventions but nothing that got the attention of the students.

Eventually we decided (well I decided) that a simple spoken conversation might be more effective than the online chat which had looked so promising.

What did I learn from this?

Well, apart from learning a few new interesting acronyms used in chatrooms, I was reminded that it's important to not just use ICTs and assume that students know how to use them. They usually use them for 'personal', 'informal' chat and in my experience just couldn't cope with trying to do anything productive with them.  So do we throw the baby out with the bathwater?

No - I am to blame. As the teacher, if we were going to have a 'debate' in class - I would have introduced it with some guidelines about how it was going to work.  If we were going to have a class 'discussion' - I would have introduced it with some guidelines about speaking one at a time and respecting the person who is speaking. 

So I should have placed some guidelines on their chat.... listening to the person who is 'chatting', thinking before they 'click', only writing something if it is appropriate to the topic and so on... basic stuff that we struggle with getting students to follow when they are using the 'native tongue' (spoken english) but seem to ignore when it comes to ICTs.

Although perhaps I need to reconsider what these particular students 'native tongue' actually is...