Exciting addition to the work I’ve been doing with Synchroneyes today! I got the children to use the chat feature to post research that they had found on the Internet about David Livingstone the Victorian explorer.
This worked incredibly well and led to a really interesting discussion with the children about chatting in general.
After the inital “Hi wassssaaaaapppp!” comments the children quickly started posting only relevant information. In fact they came and told me that they were getting annoyed with people who were still posting like that because it got in the way if the flow of information that they wanted to work on.
It struck me what a massive jump in real learning this was for these children, which completely quashed any fears that this was going to be a free for all chat a la msn.
All of this within five minutes!
I then got children working in smaller groups of six or seven to complete the task. They loved it and you could hear a pin drop in the classroom.
I asked the children what they liked about it and was amazed with the responses. Essentially they liked the fact that the chat was actually about something that they were learning about and that writing on the chat stopped “stupid conversations” starting and distracting them!
This from a class that loves to natter!
It was a great session that had some briliant learning outcomes for the children and me. Can’t wait to get back in on Monday and experiment further!
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