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Destination: A Bulletin Board for Outside Class Interaction
and Work
Foundation
This Lesson Map will focus
on establishing a bulletin board for the purposes of out-of-class interaction
and work. Despite having a class that meets predominantly in a traditional
classroom, you can establish a bulletin board and train your students
to use it with one or two class meetings. Once the bulletin board is
established, it remains a resource for out-of-class communication, collaboration,
and learning. As an asynchronous online tool, it becomes a place where
students can post and read messages anywhere at anytime.
What types of activities
can you do?
- Peer Response:
You could have students post their essay or draft of an essay to the
bulletin board and require a number of responses to peer essays (see
the Lesson Map on peer response for more).
- Class Discussion:
You could set up a weekly discussion board, and each week there is
a new topic and a required number of replies. Many Internet classes
have this regimen. Discussion board topics, however, can follow any
time cycle your establish--one week, two weeks, four (see the Lesson
Map on class discussion for more).
- Brainstorming work:
Have students post freewriting drafts or initial thinking on a topic
they eventually will be writing on.
- Refining a thesis:
Have students post their draft thesis. Require peers to give feedback.
- Groups and Project
work: If you have an extended project where students work in groups,
the bulletin board can be the place they communicate and collaborate.
It can be the place where they post certain process parts of the project.
- Establishing a collaborative
bibliography for a research project: Have each student research
and post information on two to four sources they have found. They
should include the full bibliographic information as well as a 25-50
word summary of the source.
- Posting class handouts
or other materials: You could post handouts or articles that would
be useful for your students (probably using your Instructor Home Page
would be a better way of providing access to these materials because
often these bulletin boards lose text formatting).
By having students post and
share text through a bulletin board, you make it easier for students
to see what each other are thinking and writing. This increased access
to the multiplity of views in the class makes for a richer learning
environment (see sharing texts).
In-class access to postings
on the message board for teaching purposes can be achieved either by
returning to the computer classroom for another session, or by bringing
in one of our department's multi-media carts. Each classroom has a dataport
for access to the Internet.
Practice
Using a Discussion Forum
for an asynchronous discussion
Either using a stand alone discussion board or one that is incorporated
as part of a larger course platform, you
will find a bulletin board easy to set up, use, and administer. These
options also offer the advantage of web accessibility (anywhere anytime).
Each type of discussion forum
is a bit different in how it works, but typically there are two types
of forums. One type will allow for threading so that each reply is associated
with the message replied to. Other types of forums only allow for one
level of reply (i.e. even replies to replies show at the bottom of the
list), but all replies display on the same page (which is nice for peer
response). Some forums allow for you to choose the way in which you
want the messages to display.
Tools
You have a lot of options for what technological tool you can use to
conduct an asynchronous discussion: Daedalus, web-based discussion forums
(whether within a course platform or not), course platforms, Eportal,
or a listserv. Each has benefits and limitations. Daedalus is simple
to use, but it is a LAN-based program, so it restricts out-of-class
access. Listservs use a single email address, and everyone registered
to the "list" receives any email sent to this address. Listservs
are technically easy, but if you have a large volume of posts then they
become overwhelming. Discussion forums (whether in Daedalus, Eportal,
a web-based bulletin board, or a course platform) are probably the simplest
and most versatile.
Eportal Groups--the best
and easiest option
Eportal offers you the option as a teacher to establish a "Group."
Groups come with a good menu of tools like a place for News posts, Links,
email contact, a Calendar, chatting, and Discussion Forums.
One advantage to an Eportal Group versus the default set up you receive
for each of your classes in Eportal is that message board posts are
not limited to 500 characters. Students can enroll themselves easily
once they are into the Eportal system for SAC. You can also create multiple
"Topics" or forums within the bulletin board. You can also
allow cross-class communication since any students can enroll in the
Group (you can also restrict access).
In order to set up your own Group, contact the ACCD
Help Desk 220-1616 and tell them you would like to create a Group
or Groups. They will help you.
Web-based Bulletin Boards
You could also use a web-based bulletin board. I recommend using
phpBB as a bulletin
board. It is free and open source, but you will need to find a web host
for your bulletin board. In my case, I bought some web hosting space
and a domain in order to have my own bulletin boards (Many such web
hosts exist. I happen to use iFroggy
where for $40/yr. I have my own domain and easy tools for creating my
own phpBB bulletin boards.)
You could use a bulletin board that is hosted for you but has advertisements
with it. These kind of bulletin boards are easy to find with a web search.
Blogs/Content Management Systems
Blogs are another tool available for conducting asynchronous class
discussions. Many are available for free (if you can stand the adds)
and can allow for single or collaborative (i.e. the whole class) posts
(see the Blogs Guide for more information). Blogger
is one of the first and best free blogs available.
Another option is to set up a Content Management System tool like Drupal
or PostNuke.
Each of these offer many great features for posting news, handling files,
and creating discussion forums. The drawback is that you will need to
find some web space to host you CMS site. So far, SAC and ACCD has not
hosted any of these kind of applications, so you would need to find
a way to set this tool up on your own.
Using Daedalus for an
asynchronous discussion
Daedalus is quick and easy to use--I have had students use it successfully
on the first day of class. It allows for multiple forums, and has a
nice feature where it can turn an entire conference into a single document.
Called "Mail," the Daedalus discussion forum presents each
message as a separate post with no threading (although replies are labeled
as replies). Also, Daedalus is a LAN-based program which means students
can only access the program from our English Department computers (but
not from home).
How to Use Daedalus MAIL
- Log in to Daedalus
- On the menu bar, click
ACTIVITIES and MAIL
- Click NEW MESSAGE to
post a new message. To read a message, click on the message title
and click the READ button
- Teachers can create
new conferences by clicking on the menu bar MAIL and NEW CONFERENCE.
- Students can join other
MAIL conferences by clicking on the button CONFERENCES, selecting
a conference, and clicking JOIN.
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