This week's discussion topic is huge--like, spend-a-semester-talking-about-it huge: "How can the strategies and activities that you're already using or are familiar with be adapted to encourage students' participation in interaction with peers? How can technology use support this?"
Actually, this was pretty much exactly what we did in R503 last summer: investigate tech tools and consider how we could apply them to lessons. This past fall, I took the knowledge from this course and applied it to an advanced English conversation course I've been teaching every fall for the past five years. Where students previously made posters or just discussed a topic, we now made multimodal advertisements (Animoto.com), interactive sticky-note boards (Padlet.com), or more dynamic and eye-catching posters (Smore.com); where the textbook had students fill in gaps to practice past continuous, we now wrote and illustrated stories online (DC Comics Builder, Tell-a-Story StoryBuilder).
What I discovered was that integrating technology didn't exactly lead to increased interaction in the way I had hoped. I expected that these tech tools would provide students with an excuse not only to practice the target language but also to use authentic meta-language as they discussed their project's details. To an extent, I was right: projects done in pairs or small groups led to this kind of spoken interaction, right there in the classroom. These projects elicited lots of negotiation of meaning and peer teaching as students discussed what to write or say, and lots of meta-language as students experimented with and evaluated options provided by the tech tool. BUT if students were given the option of working alone, the computer room would often be silent; when given a choice, most students elected to work solo.
At first, I was discouraged. Were the tech tools actually detracting from interaction? Students were using the language, true; but they weren't interacting. Then I realized that tech, itself, had provided a solution for this problem. Students were posting their completed projects on our class Facebook page--and that's where the interaction was taking place. The discussion I sought was still happening, to an extent; it was just freed from the boundaries of time and space as students commented on each other's projects or asked questions from the comfort of their own home, in their own time.
The next time I teach this class, I'll be sure to more carefully balance pair/group projects and individual projects, so there's more of an even distribution of spoken and written, synchronous and asynchronous, interaction; and I might make online interaction a part of students' participation grade. But overall, I really loved the way tech tools both provided an excuse for interaction and also freed interaction from the boundaries of the classroom!
Oh, and to get back to the initial question: I can see how message boards (including class ones, such as those at Collaborize Classroom), social networking sites, Skype, instant messaging, collaborative online sticky-note boards, collaborative projects via Google Drive, etc., have a lot of potential to promote student interaction by removing the limitations of time and space. Students can work together or communicate anytime, anywhere! But apart from Google Drive and Facebook, I don't really use these options for interaction outside of class. My students are generally overcommitted, as it is, so I don't assign homework, per se. Instead, my students just have to use English outside of class for a minimum of 25 hours over the course of the semester. So far, writing book reviews and sharing them in a class doc on Google Drive, and commenting on classmates' projects via Facebook have proven among the more popular tech-based options, promoting asynchronous (written) interaction that often carries over into classroom conversations.
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