1. Sample Educational Applications Key Educational Advantages User
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NowComment gives online discussions context, displaying documents together with threaded commenting on their sentences and paragraphs. Brainstorm, debate, and collaborate as never before!
Sample Educational Applications
Key
Educational Advantages
User
Testimonials
NowComment online discussion is a valuable alternative to face-to-face discussion in many teaching contexts. Key advantages include:
All students, not just some, get time to express their ideas.
Discussion automatically produces a transcript for student review and teacher evaluation.
Students' ability to browse and join multiple peer conversations leads to deeper intellectual engagement with the text (and their classmates).
Students don't lose speaking opportunities by waiting to formulate their thoughts, so comments tend to be more fully developed and more nuanced.
Shyer students avoid the spotlight of public speaking and tend to participate more.
Instructors can hide comments until an initial commenting period is over to minimize social pressure and encourage divergent opinions.
[NowComment produced] a whole range of interesting interpretations and points of departure for the class discussion that followed. The students were overwhelmingly impressed by the NowComment interface, and remarked on its ease of use and the ways in which the exercise elicited more thoughtful conversation. Students too shy to participate in class discussion were particularly enthusiastic... I plan to use NowComment in future classes as a welcome supplement to our other modes for the group analysis of texts.
Prof. Andrew Stauffer (UVA):
Director, NINES
(Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship
“The software was excellent. The quality and quantity of the student's comments on the speech were outstanding, much better than I expected; their ability to see and respond to each others' comments in context was the best part. They were very enthusiastic about the software.”
Prof. Brian Balogh (UVA):
Policy History: Tradition and Legacy (PPOL 701)
“As a professor teaching 100+ students, it gave me a sense [of] student understanding and personalities that I would never had otherwise obtained, and as a consequence, I feel like I know my students better and can teach them better.”
Prof. Jennifer Burns (UVA):
Intellectual History of the United States from 1865
“NowComment worked well to help the students in my Italian literature survey course prepare for discussion of assigned texts in Italian. I had the students enter comments into NowComment before class; even without specific instructions the students naturally responded to one another's comments as they made their own. This online social interaction primed them very effectively for in-class interaction. I also projected the NowComment webpage during class discussion so the students could see the text integrated with everyone's comments. NowComment worked reliably, and the students didn't need any training to use it.”
Dr. Jessica Otey (Duke University):
Italian 113: Introduction to Italian Literature III
“...subgroups of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars from the International Society for Scriptural Reasoning (SSR) have used NowComment to study one another's sacred literature. NowComment has given us a new capacity to share scriptural commentary and analysis with one another in the cyberspace equivalent of a face-to-face discussion. The results have been very exciting and productive.”
Prof. Peter Ochs (UVA):
Co-founder, Society for Scriptural Reading
Discussion of Assigned Texts
"In context" conversations about a document encourage student engagement. Teachers can use NowComment discussion pre-lecture to see what the students understand (and then lecture accordingly), or use it post-lecture to help students cement their understanding.
NowComment's passage-centric design helps teach use of textual evidence.
Peer Collaboration (students and faculty)
* Communication and coordination on group projects
* Feedback tool for research/scholarly papers
Writing Instruction
Peer critique groups (using powerful group formation and sharing tools)
A stepping-stone for reluctant writers and non-native speakers.
Textual Annotation
Custom Internet Content
(on-the-fly mashups)
Administrative Communications
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