Week 13

Participation and Technology

In this week's articles "10 Benefits of Getting Students to Participate in Classroom Discussions" by  Maryellen Weimer, and "Increase Student Interaction with 'Think­Pair­Shares' and 'Circle Chats'" by Kristina Robertson, we read about how to boost participation among language learners and the positive outcomes of doing it. Besides this, we had the opportunity of experiencing how technology can help us to promote participation.

Weimer's article was very helpful because as the name of it says, the author exposes the benefits of making students participate in classroom discussions. Something that I learned from this article is how participation can provide feedback to teachers. While listening to the way his or her students express their ideas, teacher can identify what areas of the language they need to emphasize, for example. Moreover, a wrong answer from a student can help teachers know what is not clear enough for students. Similarly, Robertson's article provides examples of two different activities that can be performed in the classroom in order to boost students' participation. These activities are "Think­Pair­Shares" and "Circle Chats". What I liked from this article is that the author explained the steps of each activity in a very clear and detailed way. In conclusion both articles resulted very interesting and helpful.

Moreover, in our weekly task this week we had the chance to experience participation through technology by providing our own ideas about the previously mentioned articles in a website called Nicenet. It was very easy to share my thoughts here. Thanks to this task I learned that taking an online course does not mean that you will not have the chance to participate actively.

RATED: 5