Blending In-Person and Online Discussion

When we’ve taken AthenaBridge software to a dozen classrooms in DC and Philly, we blended online and in-person discussion in 15-minute increments.

With some classes, all the students were working alone, and in other classes students were collaborating in groups of four.  With groupwork, the exchange of ideas was faster, but some group members were more dominant than others.

For those of you looking to use offline discussions in your classroom, here are some thought-provoking tips by Suzanne Chapin.  These are geared for math discussions; other subjects seem even easier for facilitating discussions because there is more room for individual interpretation, so if these suggestions work for math, they will work for many other subjects too:

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Tags: discussion, education, peer-to-peer