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Making Blackboard Discussion Boards Work for Students' Intellectual and Social Goals

Making Blackboard Discussion Boards Work for Students' Intellectual and Social Goals. Diane Lemonnier Schallert Dept. of Educational Psychology dschallert@mail.utexas.edu. Outline of my 15-minutes. Setting the stage What, why, and how to use Blackboard discussion board

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Making Blackboard Discussion Boards Work for Students' Intellectual and Social Goals

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  1. Making Blackboard Discussion Boards Work for Students' Intellectual and Social Goals Diane Lemonnier Schallert Dept. of Educational Psychology dschallert@mail.utexas.edu

  2. Outline of my 15-minutes • Setting the stage • What, why, and how to use Blackboard discussion board • Assessment and Learning or Learning and Assessment • The philosophical dilemma • 3 Ways I have found I COULD assess learning through online discussion

  3. Why use online discussion? • Invariably makes participation more shared • Allows everyone to benefit from the wisdom of the less talkative students • Allows a teacher to know HOW students are understanding a construct • Allows all to enjoy course content in a different (more creative?) way

  4. What and How I use BB • I use the Discussion Board function of BB • I replace a class meeting with online discussion • I assign students to groups of 8-10 (no more than 4 groups per class) • I give a starter comment but make it different in each group and encourage students to read and choose to comment on whatever they want • I have a minimum assignment of 3 comments in a 36- or 48-hour period

  5. Learning and Assessment • What does it mean to learn from being in a conversation with someone? • One’s ideas are made clearer, one’s ideas are changed by rubbing up against another’s, learning is made more fun • How can one know that learning has taken place? • Brilliant talk that sparkles but is not a reflection of on-the-spot learning • But it DOES happen that students learn from LISTENING to (or reading) talk • AND, it happens that students learn from making explicit their ideas, making them “come out of the fog”

  6. 3 Ways to Foster Good Things and Assess them with Blackboard Discussions • Important to set the tone and take the right stance as the leader of the “chat” • Make it important to re-read the transcript of the discussion afterwards • Consider using discussion as the actual evaluation (test) of learning

  7. 1. Tone and stance influence learning • Students CAN easily avoid learning from written discussion • Teacher CAN easily influence whether students learn from discussion • Don’t be punitive • Encourage but don’t shy away from pointing misunderstandings • Stay in there a LOT!

  8. 2. Re-reading of discussion leads to learning • Encourage students to re-read discussion once it’s over by asking questions on next exam • Bring in comments from the discussion to next face-to-face meeting

  9. 3. Use discussion as test answers • Because each posting from a student can be seen as an essay, you could use their discussion with each other AS the actual test response but one produced collaboratively • I would suggest giving a group grade, • grading each conversation wholistically, • and grading it at the END of discussion

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