Released 10/7/2009

Same class discussion, new venue

“I think Unamuno wants to shed more light on the city beneath the lake — that the lake has many secrets beneath its surface,” said Tara Kheradpir, Class 12.

“I agree with Tara,” said Maude Navarre, her AP Spanish Literature classmate. “What’s more, I think the poem suggests that the lake is ageless.”

The exchange above is recognizable: It’s a class discussion. The Upper School girls had been asked to discuss the poem “San Miguel Bueno, mártir,” by Miguel de Unamuno.

Now, imagine the discussion taking place entirely in Spanish. And not in a Chapin classroom, but in a discussion forum on the Internet.

Because that’s really how it happened.

Laura de Toledo’s students are among the first to move their classroom exchanges from Chapin’s fifth floor to the virtual realm. Experiences like these have suddenly become easy for teachers and students to create, thanks to an oddly named but exceedingly useful Web-page-making system called Moodle. Chapin began using Moodle in September to take full advantage of emerging learning technologies.

Moodle offers a plethora of options that Chapin’s previous faculty/student Web system had not. Teachers can easily post important documents such as a syllabus or worksheet, which their students can then access from anywhere. They can upload an mp3 of a song and let their students comment on it. They can give quizzes online. And, as Sra. de Toledo has done, they can ask their students to debate in a Web-based forum.

“The forum was the best way for them to express their thoughts in a spontaneous written manner,” Sra. de Toledo explained. “It allowed them to say things without having to worry about perfect grammar, but about the content of their thoughts and feelings.”

Students are already beginning to discover other advantages. In typical class discussions, Maude pointed out, “though we might take notes on what is said in class, some of our ideas and interpretations are inevitably lost when we leave the classroom.”

“With Moodle,” she added, “each of us has a written record of how our classmates analyzed the topic at hand — the forum basically functions like a transcript of our class discussions.”

Online discussions will, of course, never replace the real thing at Chapin. They are simply another option, a means to stretch students’ minds and skills and perhaps evaluate their grasp of course material in a slightly different way.