Notes about using "Chad" rooms

Notes about chatrooms – F2F with Silvia Tolisano

A chat room can be used as a warmup for thinking at the beginning of a class. I immediately see this as an effective way to get students into learning mode in my class. By having the computers already setting out (from the previous class) and logged onto a site, like her Tiny Chat room or the Today’s Meet (which seems really easy to set up and use) site she mentioned, students could engage actively in learning from the time they enter class. A prompt like, write a sentence explaining a way peoples’ actions influence the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or today’s class list of all foods they can think of that contain seeds (and, therefore, are fruit), can direct students attention to tasks, engage their thinking and expand their understanding about a topic, and have a ‘discussion’ in which everyone is able to ‘hear’ everyone else, each student is able to respond at their own rate, students are working collaboratively, and the class settles in for learning. With it already being online, it could be projected onto the screen for further discussion to begin the class.

Silva suggested Tiny Chat would be good for summarizing information. I would need to see this work. The summarizing we did in class was novice work, but, as a reader, I would have needed much more organization in my mind or maturity in my digital experiences to glean a summary out of all the short snippets that were posted. Besides the making of lists I mentioned above, a chat room could be helpful for students to ask each other questions (@Chad: I appreciate your assistance with how to find the bottom of the page…..) or to generate ideas and bounce them off each other. The question then becomes, Is this a better way of engaging students’ creativity, productivity, and learning than the other collaborative means of engaging students face-to-face? In the near future there will no doubt be many social networking applications discussing the success (or lack thereof) of this avenue.

A side comment about the digital footprint we make:
Chad suggested one can hire a company to do a search on your footprint and hire a company to clean up one’s footprint. Seems to me one would want to hire a company to go after those who slander or bully digitally as well.