Model and promote diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness by using digital age communication and collaboration tools to interact locally and globally with students, peers, parents, and the larger community. (ISTE, 2011)
In exploring the ISTE educator standards, I considered how best to instruct my computer science students to positively contribute and responsibly participate in the digital world. My school uses the discussion tool that comes with the Canvas learning management system. This discussion tool is very primitive, as it does not allow for edits to previous posts or different options for post visibility (anonymous/private). It also provides little support for properly formatting computer code in a post.
In my research on this topic, I came across a Canvas plug-in called Piazza that allowed my computer science students to engage with the class in a much richer way than is possible with the default Canvas discussion tool. I have used Piazza in all of my classes since, and it has added a much richer and useful dimension to all of my classes.
The main reason for deploying Piazza is to allow increased interaction between students. At the start of each course, I am the only one making posts, replying to questions, and giving pointers to external sites for help and/or tutorials. But within the first two weeks, students begin to reply to posts made by other students – either with their own identity or anonymously. Piazza provides a great introduction to my students on how to become responsible digital citizens by communicating and collaborating with both a local audience – their classmates – as well as a global community.
Students also post details about external tools and tutorials that they found useful to learn the subject matter. This encouraged students to interact with their classmates while also researching different course challenges in global communities such as StackOverflow and other developer-focused web sites. Piazza allows students to edit their existing post, eliminating the fear of making a mistake or saying something that could not be changed. This is not possible with the Canvas builtin discussion tool – and vital feature to encourage all students to participate in the discussion. Piazza has really helped my students build empathy and understanding of their fellow students while also promoting diversity and cultural understanding.
One unexpected outcome that I discovered after switching to the Piazza discussion tool is a gradual improvement in the comments that students put in their computer code. As many computer science instructors know, getting students to write useful comments in their code is a bit like pulling teeth. However, having students post code to Piazza, including the code comments, provided a convenient way for students to become empowered learners.
References
- International Society for Technology in Education. (ISTE; 2011). Standards for Coaches. https://id.iste.org/docs/pdfs/20-14_ISTE_Standards-C_PDF.pdf.
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