Discussion Boards: The New Instructional Text
Tuesday, November 27th by carlaThis article hit my inbox Monday. I read it and wondered, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Sometimes the best ideas are simple and obvious. Well, obvious to those who are paying attention. Submitted, then, for your approval …
Discussion Boards: The New Instructional Text
by Greg Mcverry
Introduction
Mr. Zalbyrne, a 7th grade ELA teacher, could not figure out how to adjust the comprehension instruction in his class. He knew that he had to focus on specific skills and strategies, but Mr. Zalbyrne also knew that students had to think about their comprehension habits while discussing texts. Yet, he also understood that having students write about the text they read also improves comprehension. He had tried everything. First, he tried literature circles to have students openly discuss text, but he found it impossible to try to assess skill development. Then Mr. Zalbyrne tried written responses to literature, but students lost the benefit of social interaction. If only there way to combine discussion and writing to take advantage of the transactional nature of comprehension (Pressley, 2000). So Mr. Zalbyrne searched the Internet for an answer. He came across many websites with lesson plans and then found other websites littered with teacher discussions. It was the latter that hit Mr. Zalbyrne with the solution: discussion boards!
A discussion board is a website that acts as a forum where people start discussions called threads and others respond to the thread with posts. Mr. Zalbyrne realized while reading discussion boards that they were the perfect combination of discussion and writing he needed for comprehension instruction. He then thought about how many of his former students have now taken online classes in college. These forums of advice have quickly become the “new” instructional text for learning.
Discussion Boards as a Text and Tool for Instruction
Discussion boards, as a community website that allow users to post comments to specific threads or topics, have become commonplace for today’s learner. Their use both in school and out of school has grown exponentially. In fact the number of online classes offered by college campuses reached 3.2 million in 2005 (Sloan Consortium, 2006), and discussion boards play a dominant role in the pedagogy of online distance education. As educators we must prepare students to use discussion boards as both a text and a tool for learning. After all, a primary goal of K-12 education is to prepare students for college and a global community and discussion boards are filtering their way down into the public schools.
We often focus on the integration of technology as simply a tool for improving learning. For example, discussion boards, and online learning, have allowed distance education to flourish in K-12 classrooms (Roblyer, 2005). Forward thinking educators envisioned and created a context for connecting foreign language classrooms and offering diverse advance placement classes. We must also understand, however, that as an instructional text and not simply a technology tool, discussion boards also present new challenges to learners. Technology, literacy, and content educators should include online discussions in the classroom to allow students to make meaning from the new instructional text and to benefit from asynchronous chat as a tool of learning.
Challenges of Discussion Boards as Text
First online discussions present new challenges to readers. Discussion boards often require learners to spend greater time outside of school (Myer, 2003) and require greater self-regulated learning (Garrison, 2003; Roblyer, 2005). Furthermore, students who rarely evaluate information online (Coiro, 2003) will surely come across discussion boards during Internet inquires. The reader must know how to critically evaluate the credibility and motives of authors of specific posts, the reliability of forums, compare postings by multiple authors, synthesize these differing views, and then possibly communicate by posting a response or question. These skills cannot be taught solely using offline instructional texts that require students to follow directions and perform a task. Furthermore we cannot prepare students for the type of discourse necessary for online classroom by using only offline class discussions. Yet while teaching students to comprehend discussion boards as an online text, teachers can also benefit from their utility as a pedagogical tool.
Benefits of Discussion Boards as a Tool
Forums of asynchronous chat also provide benefits as a tool for learning. First of all, because of their nature, discussion boards combine writing and discussion, two elements necessary for comprehension (Pressely, 2000). What text is more transactional than a discussion board in which the reader is both the audience and the author? Secondly, threaded discussions foster a community of learners (Grisham and Wosley, 2006), which is necessary for any successful classroom. Also discussion boards may improve the role of reluctant readers (McNabb, 2006) and students overall may even post better discussions than those conducted in offline discussion groups (Grisham & Wosley, 2006; Kymes, 2005). Finally teachers may find it easier to assess online discussions. After all, online discussions are documented and archived and therefore may serve as a portfolio of growth. Also it may be easier to identify higher order thinking skills such as evaluation when used in an online forum versus face-to-face discussion (Myer, 2003). Teachers can benefit from the use of threaded discussions as a tool and prepare students to comprehend asynchronous chat as a text by integrating existing instructional routines found in K-12 schools.
There are many possibilities for teachers who would like to incorporate discussion boards into classroom discourse (see McVerry 2007 for step-by-step instruction). Free software such as Moodle (Moodle.com) allows users to create entire online classrooms, but come with little technical support and require server space. Professional sites come with technical support, but with a price. One common technique used by classroom teachers who have to exist with limited technical resources is to simply set up a free blog (such as blogger.com, edublog.com), and then allow students to use the comment feature as a threaded discussion. Teachers can find, when working with their technology departments, easy and affordable tools to bring discussion boards into the class.
Integrating Discussion Boards and Instructional Routines
Once school districts realize the ease and affordability of discussion boards, the possibilities of using online forums in today’s classroom are limited only by the creativity of teachers. Furthermore, efforts of collaboration between technology, literacy, and content educators serve to strengthen these efforts. Students can engage in asynchronous chat using interdisciplinary units centered on literature (McNabb, 2006; Grisham & Wosley, 2006; McVerry, 2007), and it be used as the instructional text. Educators can also use discussion boards as a text to adapt classroom routines such as reciprocal teaching, case studies, and writers’ workshop models (McVerry, 2007).
Conclusion
Discussion boards present new challenges and benefits to students as both a text and a tool, and educators must prepare students to actively make meaning using asynchronous chat. Today’s students attend colleges that use distance learning, and turn to the Internet when seeking answers. In order for students to the develop the strategies, skills, and dispositions to comprehend online texts (Leu, 2006) we must strengthen the partnership with technology, literacy, and content educators. Discussion boards foster this collaboration because students can connect the standards of many disciplines without leaving home. Technological communication has become the preferred language of our students, and we must embrace this in our classrooms.
Works Cited
Coiro, J. (2003). Rethinking comprehension strategies to better prepare students for critically evaluating content on the Internet. The NERA Journal, 39, 29-34.
Garrison, D. R. (2003). Self-directed learning and distance education. In M. G. Moore & W. G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of distance education (pp. 161-168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Grisham, D.L., & Wolsey, T.D. (2006, May). Recentering the Middle School Classroom as a Vibrant Learning Community: Students, Literacy, and Technology Intersect. [Electronic Version] Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(8), 648–660. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Leu, D.J., Jr. (2006) Part I: Introduction and Theoretical Framework. Thinking about thinking: Methods for the study of online reading comprehension. Paper presented at the National Reading Conference, Los Angeles, California.
Roblyer, M. D. (2005) Who plays well in the virtual sandbox: characteristics of successful online students and teachers. SigTel Bulletin. Retrieved October 14, 2007 from http://www.iste.org.
McNabb, M.L. (2006). Fostering Ownership of Literacy Online. [Electronic Version] In Literacy Learning in Networked Classrooms (pp. 35-56). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
McVerry, J. G. (2007) Forums and functions of threaded discussions. New EnglandReading Association Journal, 43(1), 79-85.
Meyer, K. (2003). Face-to-face versus threaded discussion: The role of time and higher order thinking. In Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 3 (7).
Pressley, M. (2000). What should comprehension instruction be the instruction of? In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.),Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3, pp. 545–561). Mahwah, NJ:Erlbaum.
The Sloan Consortium. (2006, November). Making the grade: Online education in the United States, 2006. Retrieved October14, 2007, from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/ survey/pdf/making_the_grade.
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Posted courtesy of ISTE SigTel
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