On Tappedin

I'm sorry that I've fallen behind over the past two weeks. It's been very busy for me, and then, of course, because I was so busy, I got sick. That's what I get for letting myself get stressed out and not getting enough sleep. It's that time of year.

I will try to get completely caught up today!

Anyway, I've had a lot of experience with Tappedin as an example of an on-line synchronous discussion forum. We used Tappedin during Tom Reinartz's media literacy class back when I was in the English cohort at the U.

I liked some parts of it. I liked how you can create a private community for your students to use, and how you can track their activity on the site. I liked that it had a chat function and also that you could post documents, schedules, assignments, etc. I liked that it has real live people for tech support.

However, it had some problems. It was not as user friendly as I would have liked. I was able to figure it out, but I'm pretty tech savvy. Some of my students would pick it up in seconds, but others would really struggle with the look, the layout, and the chat function in particular.

Some people in the class had some on-line conflict on Tappedin, but my group was able to get together and get a lot of work done...

I'm sure there are other similar programs out there that might be better, too. But from what I've seen so far I think I prefer asynchronous posting.

My students do not all have access to computers at home. Some of them have pretty low technology skills. We do not have a computer lab and I've only got seven machines in my classroom. All of this makes on-line discussions very tricky. I am doing some work with blogs, but even that is tricky because we don't have enough computers...

I think in a different building or a different context on-line discussion would work great. I love how mush potential it has, and I'm excited to try some of these programs someday. Maybe my students could work in groups to have a on-line debate or something? Buy in would be huge, though, and probably one person in the group would work and the others would goof off. I'll have to think about it a lot more.