Excerpt: Getting All the Answers
Como Park Elementary School is home to a computer network application called
Discourse, which provides teachers with immediate feedback about what students
are learning and thinking. For the past eight years, all of Como Park's deaf
and hard-of-hearing students have participated daily in lessons using Discourse
in one of the school's three labs. Why? The reason is simple: Their teachers
love Discourse.
Each student works with a small terminal connected to the teacher's workstation at the front of the classroom. The teacher poses questions and students type their answers. Each student's response is displayed on the teacher's screen, next to the corresponding student's name.
Como Park teachers say Discourse:
- serves all ages and subjects.
- focuses students and increases time on task.
- allows for open-ended questions.
- allows for a response every time from every student.
- accommodates classes whose students have widely varying abilities.
- adapts to use with other media, such as video, transparencies, and handouts.
- permits self-paced or timed work.
- requires little training or preparation time.
- aids in administering group tests and generating automatic scores and reports.
- reinforces computer literacy and keyboarding skills.