How Do You Use It? -- page 1 of 17 --

If you’ve followed this learning module linearly, you’ve taken the time to consider what chat is, why you might implement it in your classroom, and you’ve thought of specific instances of when online chat or IM might facilitate learning in your classroom.  Now, we’d like to help you understand how to conduct and participate in an online chat session.

There are several things you should know about how to chat, and we’d like to start by helping you understand some common chat etiquette guidelines that you should pass on to your students before starting to chat.  We’d like to help you think for a moment about what your role as instructor should be in the chat session and how becoming very deliberate about the way you frame chat activities for students will help them understand what their role should be in the online chat session.

Once we’ve outlined these ideas, we’d like to give you the opportunity to learn to conduct a chat session in a couple of different kinds of chat software—first, by using Online@UT's’s Virtual Classroom and Office Hours features, and also in a very common downloadable IM software package, America Online Instant Messenger. 

This lesson, How to Use Chat, will be the longest lesson of the module, and will take you around 45 minutes to complete.