By: Jeanie Cole
“Keep Them Chatting” was an article that talked about how to get students to participate more in online classes. Students are often uninterested in what is going on and are tempted to just copy from the internet. This article gave several examples of different techniques used to keep kids interested and accountable. The first of these techniques was to ask a high-level, open-ended question to keep students engaged and learning. These are questions that have no right or wrong answer and can encourage students to be creative and use their imaginations as opposed to purely factual information. The example the article gave was: “if The Odyssey were written in the Wild West in the 1800s, what might have happened and why?” Other techniques offered were the inquiry method where students use research and problem-solving skills to answer a question; the discrepant event inquiry method, where students vies an unexplained occurrence through video, photo, etc and are asked to explore and explain possible reasons for what happened. The final two techniques given were to use personal examples where students could use something they were personally interested in as a research topic and the illogical comparisons technique where students would compare to completely non-related characters or situations. These techniques may sound silly, but if used properly, they could turn out to be incredibly valuable in any setting.
Q1: What is an example of illogical reasoning?
A1: An example of illogical reasoning would be to ask your students to compare and contrast Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln. These are two persons/characters that are completely different and would seemingly have nothing in common. But to ask students to find something in common between them could force them to use their research skills and their creative reasoning skills at the same time.
Q2: How could you implement these techniques into a classroom that is not virtual?
A2: These techniques could be used when a class goes to the computer lab for a day, or as a creative writing assignment, or even as a group project. The article gave a great example of the personal examples technique; ask the students to describe the perfect roller coaster. An educator could use this as a group project to say describe the perfect roller coaster and then create a model example for the class using a computer program or tangible materials.
Cole, J (2009, February). "Keep Them Chatting". Learning and Leading with Technology, Vol 36, Issue 5, Retrieved February 27, 2009, from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/200902/
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