June 2023 – Innovation Blog

21st Century Learning Spaces: Synchronous Chat

When I was developing an app for synchronous chat, my eighth, ninth, and tenth graders were only too happy to be my beta-testers. It was in the last month before I was to retire and so I wanted to make good use of my time remaining, especially preparing students for the conversation part of the regional world language examination in French. The chat app arose out of the desire for an effective method for students to communicate in the lesson in a paired situation, in a 21st century learning space.

Synchronous Online Discussion in a Co-located Classroom Setting

A number of advantages to blending online discussion tools in the classroom present themselves. In peer face-to-face interactions, “student differences in social status, verbal abilities and personality traits cannot guarantee equal participation rates (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). High-status, high-ability and extrovert peers may often dominate the discussion and group decision making” (Barron, 2003, Caspi et al., 2006, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Online discussion tools can reduce these factors and present a more egalitarian framework for participation.

Having students in the same room communicating with each other on a chat system may seem odd at first glance, but in addition to the benefits noted above, there are some practical benefits especially for the secondary level. The presence of an adult will ensure more on-task behavior and more appropriate behavior (no “flaming”, for example). Students may not all have equal access to home internet services such an an asynchronous model would demand. Furthermore, the synchronous model greatly ensures that the task will get done. Asynchronous assignments often fall down to procrastination, a typical foible of the adolescent. A literature review by Asterhan and Eisenmann reveal that “[c]ommunication in synchronous discussion environment is closer to spoken conversation and therefore likely to be more engaging and animating than asynchronous conferencing (McAlister, Ravenscroft, & Scanlon, 2004, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Students have also been found to be more active and produce more contributions in synchronous, than in asynchronous environments (Cress, Kimmerle, & Hesse, 2009, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann).”

When used during the class period, synchronous chat is a small part of a larger lesson which includes scaffolding, participation, and debriefing.

Early synchronous chat software such as reviewed in the study by Asterhan and Eisenmann had some practical limitations for class discussion. Instant messaging or threaded discussion boards both work on precedence by chronology, which makes conversations difficult to follow and so may actually defeat the purpose of the exercise. Some teachers have attempted to use FaceBook or Twitter to facilitate class discussions. These platforms were designed to satisfy a commercial interest.

A 21st century learning space paradigm provides the necessary structure (guardrails and training wheels) to maximize quality participation frequency while eliminating concerns about privacy and advertising.

How it Works

The chat app works like this: the teacher opens a chat session and displays the host control dashboard on the large screen. Next, students join the session from their devices and once everyone is onboard, the teacher explains the assignment. The teacher then clicks the control to generate random partners and then to enable the chat session. A timer can optionally be set. Students engage in a real time discussion to carry out the task for the allotted time. During this session, the teacher can display the current chats going on (anonymously, of course) and offer any coaching that would be useful. At the conclusion of the time, the host closes the chat session and can debrief by displaying the chats and offering comment. The chats are anonymous: unless students introduce themselves in live session, they do not know necessarily who their partner is. The pairs are organized by “city”, a nickname generated by the app to identify them from a list of world capitals.

The first issue that developed was that they enjoyed it (not necessarily a problem but…). It caused a lot of “real” chatter in class as students chuckled about funny things others had said or trying to find out who their partner was. Older students who were more serious about their studies also were motivated to communicate outside the chat session to strategize in real time addressing their assignment. My tenth graders were assigned to use the chat as a writing exercise, such that they answered the prompt by collaboratively composing a paragraph. When a class is engaged in this activity, they need to be trained to maintain a mostly silent room, focused on the task and not the distractions.

A second issue that arose in the early version of the app was that students would forget the prompt or instructions. It was easy to modify the app to allow the teacher to attach “accessories”: text, video embed, and/or a PDF document with the assignment and rubric displayed. Now students could refresh their understanding of the assignment by clicking a button.

Sometimes a student would leave the chat window to another browser tab to look something up. For situations where is is not allowed, I modified to app to include a “proctor” that records right in the app when a student leaves the window and when they paste in text.

Research on this sort of application support the practice of including assessment in the activity (Gilbert and Dabbagh, 2005, as cited in Balaji & Chakrabati, 2010). Students are aware of the rubric and are graded, which has an enhancing effect on their performance as they are often more mindful of their progress. Using the timer, which displays in the front of the room from the teacher’s host screen is also helpful. If one is pressed for time, one is less likely to be off-task without knowing it.

In keeping with the paradigm of the 21st century learning space, the app lends itself well to assessment and debriefing. The assessment screen makes it easy to assess student work on a built-in rubric.

Students can see their scores and comments.

I developed this in the context of teaching French, but its application to other subjects is clear. For example, a social studies lesson could include a document or video segment for students to analyze or a short discussion on a topic from lecture.

The chat application is designed as a 21st century learning space .

Guardrails: The proctor for the chat app reports on text paste-ins and leaving the browser tab.
Training Wheels: The optional accessories can provide the scaffold support for the discussion. The optional timer supports on-task behavior.
Debriefing: In debriefing mode, anonymized student contributions to chat can be displayed for analysis and discussion.
Assessment and Feedback: In scoring mode, an efficient system of evaluation saves time and offers students significant feedback.
Swiss Army Knife: The chat can be viewed in discussion mode, where other features can be applied such as identifying logical fallacies and replying to the posts of students other than one’s assigned partner. In forum mode, the teacher can participate.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.

Synchronous chat turned out to be a hit in my French class. It provided a solid and effective tool for engaging everyone in the lesson and made me feel like my time was well spent. In the next academic year (2023-24), I will be teaching an online synchronous college level French course. Look for posts next fall where I share how the new app went over in that class.

References

Aderibigbe, Semiyu Adejare, Can online discussions facilitate deep learning for students inGeneral Education?

C.S.C. Asterhan and T. Eisenmann, Introducing synchronous e-discussion tools in co-located classrooms: A study on the experiences of ‘active’ and ‘silent’ secondary school students, Computers in Human Behavior (2011).

21st Century Learning Spaces: Accountability and Executive Functioning

During the pandemic, many office workers moved to remote work from home. This precipitated a rise in monitoring software that companies could use to ensure that, being at home, workers were productive. An article in Forbes Magazine from 2021 reports that “[d]emand for worker surveillance tools increased by 74% compared to March 2019.” This rush to monitor and micromanage turned out to be unnecessary, as fears of a loss or productivity proved unfounded and “94% [of companies] reported that worker productivity either stayed at the same levels or improved.”

But this is not the case with adolescents.

The traditional classroom had to be a “very supervised” place because, by virtue of the fact that they are immature, most of our charges need guidance to get back on track. It is one reason why remote learning went so badly for many youngsters: it is not in the nature of most to be focused. The executive functioning needed to ignore distraction, set goals and reasonable timelines for work, even to break a longer task up into smaller, achievable segments is rarely present in adolescence. Until this develops, the role of the instructors includes teaching this skill and guiding students to follow the right course. Teaching with digital devices at present has reduced much of this supervisory ability. 21st century learning spaces would come with an array of monitoring and accountability features.

Data […] promotes accountability, but it also puts the student potentially in the driver’s seat and that is what developing executive functioning is all about.

I recall an instance where a student of mine was completing the essay portion of an examination remotely. I was able to monitor his examination in real time using software that shared his screen with me. When I noticed that he was typing sentences that appeared beyond his ability, I was able to google those phrases and find the source he was plagiarizing from online (he had his phone with him to cheat). This monitoring software allowed me a virtual way to simulate normal classroom supervision and to take the natural step of concluding the examination and award no credit.

After the pandemic, I continued using digital tools for student work. My students all had ChromeBooks. I had a student who was clever in taking advantage of a certain doubtfulness about technology by some adults around him. Faced with an incomplete assignment, he would claim he did it and that the app must have “lost his work”. He would claim that it “did not save”. In a traditional classroom, I would have seen his paper and whether it was written on, but the digital work did not include this monitor yet. I adjusted the software for his writing assignments to report when a response was deleted, when a student left the browser page for another, when students pasted text in, and even double-check the server to ensure an answer was saved. These application features returned important accountability assurances that were initially lost when moving to digital devices.

As time went on, my colleagues and I devised further modifications to the software at Innovation. I developed the “proctor” on important apps for testing and writing.

The proctor records data about the page and the students’ interactions with the assignment. Depending on the particular assignment, it records when work has begun, when an ancillary resource like a video has successfully loaded, when a student leaves the page and for how long, when text is pasted in, and when answers are saved. The proctor is visible to students (see illustration above) so they know their work is being monitored.

My colleague in the science department uses a flipped classroom technique. He made a great suggestion for the development of an app to monitor student interaction with a video assignment. As a student watches a video assignment, proctor records events like start video, stop video, how long between pauses, when the video ended, and how long the student was there.

The tracking monitor helped maintain a system of accountability for students.

Besides the proctor, Innovation tracks student activity around the site. The auditor maintains a record of logging in, accessing a course, starting a task, saving work, getting a score, etc.

The critical work of developing executive functioning in adolescents can be enhanced by providing youngsters the kind of data that, if they attend to it, can inform their decisions about what they should do. The proctor and other reporting tools are available to all students. Although consequences for missing the mark on attention to task can and should be part of the program, it is not great practice to be all sticks and no carrots. Objective data on what a teenager is actually doing (rather than what they remember they did or want you to think they did) can be the focus of discussions about on-task behavior and how the individual can take responsibility for it. We can take a look at performance on as assignment and examine on-task behavior related to its production. Could on-task behavior have improved the final product?

Data like this promotes accountability, but it also puts the student potentially in the driver’s seat and that is what developing executive functioning is all about.

21st Century Learning Spaces: The Concept

My first experience using computers to teach was in 1993 when I was teaching French at a small, rural school in the Adirondacks. When the US Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York closed, it donated its old computers to regional schools. They were “286s” that basically only ran, well, BASIC! Fascinated, I taught myself BASIC and started writing programs to drill vocabulary and verb conjugations. I really have not stopped coding educational apps since. It turned into a very stimulating hobby and very useful for my teaching practice. (When we were doing remote learning during the pandemic, my students were already operating in a digital classroom and remote learning was easy!)

Those old “IBM Compatible” computers were designed by computer engineers for the business world. The input interface was a keyboard (for typists and secretaries who, in the old days, were the only ones in the office who needed to learn to type). The big, boxy device was designed to sit on an office desk. The software ran programs like simple word processors and spreadsheets. These are also office utilities. You begin to see where I am going here?

Computers like these were initially devised to increase the efficiency of offices. They were for business.

I saw my first computer game at my cousin’s house when I was in middle school. His family had an Atari system. That was also where I first saw coding in BASIC. I saw the early computer game, Pong, at a restaurant when I was in my early teens. And there was Space Invaders at the arcade in Old Forge… And there was an arcade at the Fairmount Fair mall … You begin to see where I am going now?

Computers like those were devised for entertainment. Whether for entertainment or for commerce, the whole paradigm was intended for purposes other than education.

I was computer coordinator in my school at the time when computers and internet first migrated into schools. I was there in the heated discussions over whether we use Mac or IBM. I helped wire our school for internet and networking. I ran cables through crawlspaces and attic spaces in the 70-year old school. Talk was about what kids will need in this computer age and mainly we felt they needed skills associated with business, so when we adopted devices that were primarily designed for offices and plunked them in classrooms we figured it was good. Computer labs were de rigueur in the late 90s and early 00’s. Each classroom in my school had four or five PCs, which we built in a basement workshop. We were running Windows, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and so forth. We were trying to bend a device and its software that was designed for business and entertainment to classroom use.

By 2012, smartphones had become ubiquitous among students and this led to a number of other problems. Young people mainly play games and socialize on their devices. Socializing mediated by social media platforms has made changes and caused problems we are only beginning to unravel.

People use digital devices to engage in commerce, participate in entertainment, and to socialize. These being the principle purposes of the devices, they shape the course of design not only of the physical device itself but the software and features that the devices host.

My thesis is that when we brought these devices into schools, right from the beginning, we were trying to repurpose things meant for commerce, entertainment, and socializing into an environment where none of those was our pedagogical purpose. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it does not.

What do apps look like that are devised for education?

I use the phrase “21st Century Learning Spaces” to refer to a digital device and its software that fit education well because it is designed for that purpose and not repurposed from some other setting. I don’t build digital devices, but I do write software. For the past ten years, my colleagues and my students and I have been dissatisfied with bending apps to serve an educational function and having it not quite fit. Every try to use Google Forms to give a quiz? Is that really easier than what we used to do?

I hope you will join me in the next few posts and permit me to unpack the 21st Century Learning Space concept with its implications, limitations, and applications to education. I hope teachers will try out Innovation Assessments and see whether I have managed to meet some of the criteria for educational apps in a 1:1 device classroom.