In this lesson you have learned about a variety of activity structures. As you recall, activity structures are flexible and useful in a variety of contexts. These activity structures are sometimes classified into three categories, one-to-one, one-to-group, and group-to-group. In this activity you will be presented with a number of classroom scenarios and you will be expected to indicate which type of activity structure would best suit the scenario. You will also be required to discuss some of the issues one might encounter when implementing the identified activity structure. These issues include what technologies you would use to facilitate the activity and why, and what management issues you might experience.
Multiple Choice
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1. Scenario One:
example: This scenario could make use of a one-to-one activity such as peer exchange. A technology that could be used would be e-mail with the students emailing their lesson plans to each other as attachments. E-mail would be a good choice for this activity because it is a fairly common technology that is good for communicating facts and well though-out opinion. Alternatively, students could post their lesson plans on a website and use a guest-book script to collect information from a number of peers. Posting lesson plans to a web site would also be useful as students build professional portfolios. This would be an example of a one-to-group activity. Issues that might be of concern to an instructor facilitating students engaged in this activity would be that of ensuring that all students have appropriate people to share their lesson plans with, and the need for some technical support for helping students install an appropriate guest-book script on a web server.
2. Scenario Two:
example: This scenario could be accomplished in a number of ways. One way would be to have the master teacherīs lesson videotaped and later viewed by the students in their location then make use of threaded discussion to post questions for the master teacher to respond to. The use of video tape and threaded discussion might be advantageous because it would be asynchronous meaning that the students and master teacher would not have to be engaged in this communication at exactly the same time. This would be an example of a one-to-group activity structure. With increased technical support or knowledge the use of desktop video conferencing might let students watch the master teacher deliver a lesson in real time with a synchronous chat or video conference immediately following the lesson. Aside from the technical issues involved, this scenario requires the facilitating instructor find a cooperating teacher and to manage schedules. It might be necessary to develop a system to control how many students were able to ask questions at one time to make sure that the chat or conference following the lesson was effective.
3. Scenario Three:
example: There are a number of Spanish education chat rooms as well as Spanglish chat rooms where a mix of Spanish and English is used for communicating. Students can practice their Spanish language skills in these chat rooms in one-to-one activities like information exchanges. A reason for using chat rooms for this activity would be to raise student interest and to increase the time students spend engaging in the activity. Another way to accomplish this activity would be to set up a one-to-one activity such as a keypal exchange using e-mail. Using e-mail might be most appropriate for students who lacked confidence in their Spanish skills as the pace of the communication is slower and the students could take the time to carefully craft their message and have them checked by more proficient Spanish writers. An activity of this type requires the facilitating teacher help find appropriate keypal partners. Another activity structure that could be used for this is a group-to-group activity where your class might work on a collaborative project with another class. Partnering with a Spanish speaking class to produce a website or to do a comparative study of student life, the environment or popular culture via desktop video conferencing would provide the type of language use that this activity seeks to create. In some settings the instructor needs to be able to monitor the activity to ensure appropriate conversations are occurring.
4. Scenario Four:
example: This is a classic one-to-group activity structure in the form of a guest speaker. Desktop video conferencing or text-based-chat could be used to facilitate this activity. Desktop video conferencing would probably help achieve the greatest impact because it is most similar to face-to-face communication. Text-based-chat is often easier to implement although it is not as rich a medium. It might be useful to have students learn about the speaker or topic as well as draft potential questions to pose to the speaker making their appearance prior to the actual event.
