E-mail and E-conferencing

E-mail and e-conferences can be used to support teaching and learning as well as to support your own professional development. As with all activities involving pupils and the web, you should be aware of the comments provided in the section on Internet Safety.

Mentoring

Having a more knowledgeable partner can be of great assistance and can lead to pupils achieving more than they would independently. Adults or more able peers can serve as the more knowledgeable partner to scaffold pupils' learning. As a teacher you will have mentored pupils yourself and used pairing of more able and less able pupils as a teaching strategy in your classroom to support pupils' learning.

Knowing what help you need and how to get that help is an important factor in successful learning. Just working out what question you need to ask is often difficult. Support when you need it from a teacher or peer to assist in explaining and clarifying meaning can be helpful. However in a busy classroom with only a short time for interactions with a teacher, this is often difficult to achieve. Learning how to ask the 'right' questions in order to get help from a teacher is something that can be modelled. This can be learned by pupils watching more successful peers interact in classrooms or by joining in an e-conference.

Many teachers will also have had experience of e-mentoring during NOF ICT Training. If you trained with the Lewisham Talent Consortium, you will have had experience of using an e-conference and you will have posted messages to ask questions, responded to other colleagues questions and received answers to your questions from your tutor or another colleague. You may be interested to join a national e-conference. To find out more about e-conferences, forums and discussions that are taking place visit the Becta gateway.

Four of the activities in the Lewisham Integrating ICT publication include the use of e-conferencing to provide on-line mentoring for pupils. These are Activities 15, 24, 26 and 29. There are also two activities (21 and 22) that include peer mentoring for teachers. Detailed below is just one of these activities as an example of how mentoring by a teacher using e-conferencing can assist pupils to learn.

Screenshot of old EMAG front page

The focus of an EMAS/ICT project, written up as Activity 15, was to encourage boys' multicultural reading and writing groups. Advisory teachers and teachers in six different primary schools worked together to create an e-conference for pupils to discuss a book they had been given to read. The book was 'Thief' by Malorie Blackman. An advisory teacher acted as the conference moderator. A conference moderator is rather like the chairperson at a meeting. Pupils were encouraged by the moderator to discuss and share their ideas and ask questions while they were reading the book 'Thief'. Pupils and teachers were given some basic training in how to use an e-conference and the rules about acceptable behaviour when engaging in the conference.

The book 'Thief' raised lots of issues about social behaviour and one of the issues pupils discussed was whether it was right to steal in a particular situation. Pupils asked lots of sensible questions and the moderator responded to the questions. Once pupils had posted a question, both the question and the response remained as a text file within the conference. This enabled pupils, the moderator and teachers to track back over the questions and responses as many times as they wanted to. If you look at the pupil evaluation printed with activity 15, you will see that the pupil had learned, in addition to ICT skills, how to participate in a discussion. The pupil also wrote, in response to "what will you improve/change next time?" that he thought he should have asked 'better' questions. This had been a very useful learning experience for this pupil. The whole project was also successful in encouraging boys to read not just this one book 'Thief', but some also went on to independently read other books by Malorie Blackman.

Follow this link to see how the project has developed.

If you are considering setting up an e-conference you can do this using your LGfL 'digitalbrain' portal account. Below is a list of steps to outline how you can get started:

As you can see, it will take time to learn how to set up and run an e-conference. However, as noted in the explanation of the EMAS project above, this can be a very worthwhile activity in terms of pupils’ learning.

Collaborating

Collaborative learning involves the joint construction of meaning through interaction with others. As a teacher you will have used collaboration as a teaching strategy to encourage your pupils to interact with each other, to share ideas and to discuss issues. You may also have worked with teachers in other classrooms or other schools to provide pupils with access to a broader range of data and ideas than they could experience in their own class.

Physical visits to other schools are often time consuming and expensive to organise. The Internet provides an environment where learners can collaborate with other learners at a distance. However, if you are planning a collaborative project with another school you may find it helpful to have at least one visit where pupils are able to meet face to face to get to know each other in a familiar situation.

In the Lewisham Integrating ICT publication you will find a number of examples of collaborative projects between schools involving jointly writing stories, contributing to national databases, discussing issues and sharing information and ideas. Two of these projects included (1) pupils in two schools jointly writing a science fiction story (activity 11) and (2) taking part in a national science investigation to build a data set of woodlouse populations (activity 9). The teacher evaluations for these projects indicate there were added learning benefits from engagement in a collaborative project with another school. Teachers indicated that pupils were more motivated, demonstrated that they were enjoying the activity and that they were enthusiastic about communicating with pupils in another school. In the case of the shared story pupils’ vocabulary was extended and in the case of the woodlice survey pupils’ scientific classification skills were increased.

Other opportunities for collaborative projects could be to bridge the gap between KS2 and KS3. Gaining information about Y7 pupils’ previous experience is an issue for secondary schools. Pupils in Y7 can become disaffected and bored if they find themselves repeating work they have covered in Y6. Collaboration between primary and secondary schools can be facilitated by joint projects. Volume 1 of the Lewisham Publication series contained an activity which described how teachers in primary and secondary schools encouraged pupils to share understandings of life in their different environments via e-mail. The teachers started the project with a physical class visit so that the pupils from Y6 could see what the secondary school looked like and use the ICT facilities. Pupils in Y6 then e-mailed Y7 pupils posing questions about life at secondary school.

Teachers and pupils can benefit from links across the globe, and the problem of how to find partners can be eased by using educational websites such as Global Gateway.

E-mail Guidelines

The following are some general guidelines for using e-mail*:

A code of conduct:

To make sure your messages are read:

* Thanks to Michelle Selinger, 'Know your netiquette', (Interactive, November 1998)

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Electronic Conferencing Guidelines

Guidelines for the Conference have been placed by the moderator on the Lewisham Conference Site:http://ecs.lewisham.gov.uk/login

Don't forget the important advice provided in the section on Internet Safety.

Last update: 10th October 2007

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