Had a conversation today with the participants in the VLE about how they felt about answering questions in 'text chat' mode. I can see that the advantage of this pedagogically is that more people get to answer, and it does help to show up any misunderstandings or misapprehensions that they are labouring under.
On the other hand, it's more of a permenant record of a mistake and it's very public, so I wanted to know how people felt about this. The people I asked acknowledged that this was true, but didn't find it too embarrassing. Other things that were mentioned, however, were that :
- some people don't type fast, and so the touch typists have an advantage and that
- sometimes people don't know whether to type or talk.
Re the second point, I think it is an idea to make this explicit and to 'train' people to understand that:
- text chat works best as a whole group
- If you want to speak you should put up your hand or a confused icon etc
- When you're not speaking, you should turn off your mike -this is causing some problems in the breakout rooms with feedback.
What we did do today that was a great success was that the participants wrote on the whiteboard screen to provide answers and this worked very well, both in the breakout rooms and in the main room.
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