Flexible Learning Environments

Questions I am currently thinking about and plan to write about soon:

1. Are PLEs suited to some subjects more than others?

2. Are PLEs suited to some students more than others?

3.  What is going in at my own school that links closely to the PLE concept? (And how successul are they?)

I have recently started using email (async) more regularly than telephone calls (sync) for parent contact. Although there is always a place for sync discussions (particularly for sensitive issues and the context of the issues may not be well understood), my biggest positives are:

i) Sometimes the parent feedback is small, still important, but just a samll example of a positive aspect of teh students learning. I am unlikely to ever interrupt a parent at home to share something which they may possibly consider trivial compared to whatever else they may be involved in at the time. Even though this may be a great encouragement to them.

ii) As a teacher I am wary of getting caught up in a long telephone call when all I wish to share (or receive) is a brief/specific piece of information. Our social norms often make tis very difficult outside an aync. communication.

iii) Sometimes parents (and teachers) also like to think about a response rather than being put on the spot.

iv) It is great to have a permanant record of some conversations.

One example – A positive experience?

A few years ago I experiemented with a year 10 class, by establising an internal school discussion board to allow students to undertake an aync. discussion of a particular topic. The primary purpose of the experiement was to encourage students to consider their contributions a little more carfeully before they through them out there. I thought that by slowing them down a few of the students would be forced to think through their main ideas rather than jumping in too quickly.

As a result of this exercise I realised that:

a. an electronic copy of the discussion provided a useful tool for some of the slower learners (a benefit I had not considered at the time)

b. the same students that tended to jump in during normal classroom (sync.) discussions still tended to ignore other people’s contributions and follow their own train of through only.

c. some quieter students prefered to think through their ideas before expressing them, these students loved this tool.

d. An absent student was able to pick things up far more easily when she returned. And several students contributed to the discussion from home.

e. Some myths were propagated throughout the class as I could not stop them quickly enough.

f.  Because so many students were active at the same time many students spoke past one another, different wave lengths, and failed to build upon one anothers ideas, as they would a in a sync. discussion.

g. Maybe as students are now very familiar with chat conventions the problem highlighted (in f.) above is less likely to be an issue. Perhaps I did not establish the expectations well enough from the beginning, and the tool exacerbated this.

h. To keep the discussion at a positive level I was kepy very busy moderating the various student entries.

i. Maybe this experiment went quite well because I was lucky enough that the first few entries were quite good and set the standard for other students.

j. There are other ways of ‘controlling’ student contributions in the traditional class discussion which I now use. As we so t discover, opportunities/benefits arise in areas that we may not have originally intended.