Works & audiences

One idea I'm particularly interested in is a conversational examination. I think an oral approach can allow for more flexibility for both parties involved. With a recorder the audience could grow from just the teacher to any number of other realms. At its simplest such a conversation could be uploaded to a student blog, where their parents and peers would be invited to check in.

At a higher level two students from widely different backgrounds could converse about it, whether in real time or not. Here the most exciting thing is technology facilitating a multicultural, multiviewpoint approach in a classroom in ways not previously possible.

A small idea that I think could improve reading comprehension and retention would be to take quick audio notes while reading a text. Students could ask short questions or share quick comments on a portable device as they're reading and they could be used to foster class discussion the next day. I know that when I'm reading something I'll often have thoughts in a moment that are gone by the end of the chapter. Having an audio record of unedited thoughts could be very useful for whole text comprehension. In this case the audience would be the whole class, and students could refer back to those audio notes while completing other assignments on the same work.