Uses of Chat
You may wonder why use Moodle's Chat when Skype, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and other large services offer Internet telephony and chat capability, even with video and file transfer abilities.
The answer is simple. By using Moodle's Chatroom, you have control of the tools and the transcript and you're able to automatically contact the individuals who are registered in your course. Moodle's Chatroom is connected with your courses and so only people who have registered for your course can enter. It is much easier to keep up with assessment and to assign grades for Chat participation with Moodle's convenient integration.
In this chapter, we explore questions such as What is Chat good for? And How can I achieve success in an online Chat? As Moodle's Chat function is similar to most other chat software, the answers to these questions apply to more than just Moodle.
Test preparation and online study groups
For some students, an online class may seem very isolated. This is especially true for those of us who grew up before the age of online bulletin boards, instant messaging, and short text messages. As midterm and final exam time approaches and the students' stress levels increase, this feeling of isolation can grow. Using chat sessions for review and test preparation can reduce the feeling of isolation and can be an effective teaching method. Also, the chat logs provide a unique learning tool, which you won't get in a face-to-face review session.
One of the keys to a successful chat session is limiting the number of participants. If you are teaching a large class, consider breaking the class into groups and holding a review session for each group. Moodle enables you to separate any class or specific activity into groups. The members of one group cannot participate in the activities of another group. So, when you separate your class into groups, you've essentially created a separate chat for each group. The groups can be totally separate so that the members of each group cannot see each others' work or even be visible to each other, so that members of one group can see but not participate in the other groups' work. The chat transcripts can be made visible for all students if you'd like. In the case of study groups and other chat topics, be sure to name the Chatroom and to tie it to a specific learning objective or course goal.
When you create a group in Moodle, it exists at the course level. This means the group can be applied to all activities within the course and not outside.
If you separate the students into groups for a chat and then use those groups in other activities, the students will have the same group in those other activities. Before separating students into groups for a chat, you should consider the effect that the grouping will have on any other activity in the course.
If you want to use different groups for different activities, you will need to either:
- Change the group membership as needed, that is, change the groups as you progress through the course
- Create a second course, enroll your students in the second course, and create alternative groups and activities in that course
The key settings in the Editing Chat window are:
- Save past sessions: This determines how long the chat transcript is saved
- Everyone can view past sessions: This enables the students to view the transcripts
- Next chat time: You may also set the time and dates for chat sessions that repeat themselves.
If the study group has not worked together before, you might want to jump-start their relationship by assigning each student in the group a different review topic to prepare for the chat. You should also prepare review questions to ask each student during the chat. Remember that, in an online chat, it's very easy for students to lurk and watch without participating. You need to be ready to draw them out with questions about the review material that you've assigned.
Typing is more difficult than speaking and people naturally take the path of least resistance. Keep your questions open ended and encourage students to elaborate so that they do not give one word answers, which is an easy way out.
In this example on new trends in tourism, students provide their own opinions and suggestions about how to promote a specific beach community.
Notice that the question can be used for students to start sharing ideas that can then be used for collaborating in a project or for posting in a discussion forum. The chat is more informal and, since it's synchronous, it allows for more spontaneity and real-time sharing of ideas.
Reviewing papers and other assignments
Regrettably, the Internet has made plagiarism easier than ever. Moodle can't be used to determine if a paper or passage is plagiarized, but a private chat in Moodle can tell you if a student learned anything from the paper of assignment he/she handed in. The more original a paper, the more the student will remember about it and learn from it. You can schedule a private chat with each student after they've submitted their papers and ask them questions about the subject of their papers.
Keep in mind that chat sessions are not just for sharing verbal content or comments. They are also effective if the instructor incorporates links to resources or if students share links to articles, videos, images, and other pertinent resources.
There are a variety of situations where you might want to chat one-on-one. Reviewing a student's assignment is one of them. Moodle does not offer an obvious way to limit the participants in a chat to just you and one selected student. Just as we used a workaround in Chapter 2 , Instructional Material, to set up a private forum for one student and the teacher, we need to use a workaround here to set up a private chat. You may set a number of criteria so that the student cannot access the chat until the terms are satisfied.
The workaround for creating a one-on-one forum involves using the Groups feature. Moodle enables you to create a separate chat for each group in a class. We can create a group for every single student in our class and then create a chat with the groups. If we select Separate groups for the Group mode, we will totally segregate each student into his or her own chat room, where only that student and the teacher can participate and see the transcript. This would be appropriate if students should not see each other's papers. If we select Visible groups for the Group mode, we will limit the Chatroom to just the student and teacher but other students will be able to see the transcript. This would be appropriate if students are allowed to see other papers.
Another way to keep a Chatroom private is to restrict access by means of groups or user profiles or another set of restrictions that will make sure that only the person you want to chat with will be able to see and/or enter the chat.
The chat will be hidden from all students who do not fit the criteria.
Guest speakers
Chat gives you a chance to have a guest speaker in your online course. You'll need to create a student-level account for your guest speaker. When you're creating the speaker's account, as a matter of courtesy set the Email display setting to Hide my email address from everyone, unless your guest speaker explicitly gives permission for students to contact him/her via e-mail.
You will also need the speaker's permission to save the chat session for future viewing. This is to avoid copyright issues. Try to get this in writing from the speaker.
For a good example of a chat transcript featuring a guest speaker, see: http://nstoneit.com/elearning/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/schoolchat.jpg .
Including chats from previous classes
The Save past sessions setting saves a transcript of each chat session. You can use these transcripts as reference material in your classes. To get the transcript from a past chat into your class, use the Backup function to export the chat from the previous class and the Restore function to bring it into your current class. You will need admin or manager access to do this since teachers cannot back up or restore user data.
The procedure for copying a transcript of a chat is as follows:
- Enter the past course as a Teacher or Administrator.
- From the Administration block, select Chat Administration.
- On the Chat Administration menu, as shown in the next screenshot, select View past chat sessions.
- Click on the View past chat sessions button and then click on List all sessions.
- Click on See this session in the session you are interested in.
- Copy and paste the session transcript into a Word document.
The Everyone can view past sessions setting enables students to view the transcripts of past chats. This means you can save the chat transcripts from previous classes and use them as reference material in the future. However, the very presence of a chat room in your course means that students can enter the chat room at any time and engage in a chat session. How do you include the transcript of a past chat in your course without creating an active chat room? The answer is Moodle's Override roles function.
From the Editing Chat window, select Override roles. By default, the Talk in a chat option is checked only for the Student role. Selecting Prevent for this capability will disable the student's permission to talk in the chat room, while still allowing them to read chat logs.
Foreign language practice
You can use Chatrooms to pair up students with foreign language speakers for language practice. A chat room offers the following advantages for language practice:
- A chat enables students to reach out to another country in ways they might not be able to without the chat.
- A chat's pace is usually faster than most written exercises, yet slower than face-to-face conversation. In a chat, the student has extra, but not too much time, to translate what his/her foreign partner said and to think about what to say next. A chat's pacing makes it a good transition between leisurely-written exercises and fast face-to-face exchanges.
- Chat logs provide material for review and remediation. After the chat, each student can review their own or another student's transcript for grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. For instructions on how to accomplish this, see the Compiling and reviewing chat transcripts section later in this chapter.
If you are configuring your chat as a part of a virtual lab or conversation circle for a foreign language class, you may wish to also embed apps or include a link to online resources such as dictionaries and translation software. A few include WordReference (http://www.wordreference.com/ ) and Google Translate. Google Translate may not be as effective as other programs but it is free.
One of the keys to a successful foreign language chat is preparing the students' vocabulary. Before starting chat, agree upon the topic with your foreign counterpart. Prepare your students by building their vocabulary in that topic. Also, give the students a list of keystrokes for foreign language characters. Feel free to copy the following table for the benefit of your students.
You can take several approaches for reviewing chat logs. One of the easiest approaches is to have students copy a minimum number of lines from their chat logs into an online assignment and edit these in the assignment window. Or you can copy lines from the various chats yourself and compile them into a document that you then ask the students to edit online. This enables you to choose the chat portions that offer the greatest opportunity for learning.
Moodle's Assignment module gives you an easy place to present the transcript and instruct the student to edit it.
In order to copy a chat transcript in Moodle, as you select the text also select the avatars (pictures) of the participants and the time of each post.
You might not want to include the avatars and times in the transcript. To create a copy of the transcript without these, do the following:
Select the part of the chat transcript that you want to copy and follow this procedure:
- Press Ctrl + C or command + C to copy.
- Open a new word processing document. For example, open a new Microsoft Word document.
- From the View menu, select Normal (for Word) or Draft (for WordPerfect), or Web Layout (for OpenOffice). The key is to view the document so that it wraps as few lines as possible. In many word processors, viewing the document in draft mode minimizes the number of lines that are wrapped.
- From the Edit menu, select Paste special. At this point, most word processors will give you a dialog box with several choices. >Select Unformatted text>.
- The chat transcript will be pasted into the word processing document; only the text is pasted minus the avatars.
- At this point, if you are in Word, you can use a trick to easily select the times at the beginning of each line. With the Alt key held down, draw a rectangle around the characters that you want to select. Your selection can include just the first few words of each line.
- Delete the selected text. Now you will be left with just the chat participants' names and their dialog.
- Copy the chat and paste it into the Moodle assignment.
After you have compiled chat transcripts, you can assign students the task of editing them for spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and logic. This is especially useful in a language course after your students have participated in a foreign language chat. You can then compile parts of the chat transcripts into an assignment and have the students find and correct any mistakes that they or their foreign partners made.