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TERRIE: Technology Enhanced Required Reading Interactive Exercise


Here is an interactive strategy that can be used in virtual classroom environments (such as WebEx, Placeware, or Centra).

Initialize

1. Display on screen the first section of the reading assignment. (I had a dense technical description of a software program printed using 18 point type size.)

2. Tell the participants: "Please read this paragraph. It is a part of the lesson you are going to work on today. As you read--or after you finished reading--type a series of fact-recall questions based on the content. Type these questions on your feedback window."

3. Pause for a couple of minutes. Keep track of the questions from the participants that appear on your feedback window.

4. Move to a slide that says, "End of reading. You have 30 seconds more to type any more fact-recall questions."

Closed Questions Quiz

5. Move to a slide that say, "End of question construction. Quiz time is about to begin."

6. Tell the participants: "I am going to conduct a quiz. I will read one of the questions that you typed. You have 30 seconds to immediately type the answer. The person who typed the first correct answer will receive 10 points. The second person will receive 5 points. The third person will receive 2 points. The other people will not get any points."

7. Read a question at random. Display a count down timer.

8. At the end of the 30 seconds, announce the names of the first, second, and third participant who typed in the answers.

9. Repeat steps 6-8 a few more times.

Open-Questions Quiz

10. Re-display the same paragraph to be read.

11. Tell participants, "Here's the same paragraph again. This time, you have 2 minutes to type some open-ended questions based on the content of the paragraph. Your question should require higher level thinking such as evaluation, analysis, application, synthesis, making inferences, and so on. As an open-ended question, there should not be a single correct answer."

12. If appropriate, give an example of an open-ended question.

13. Review the questions being typed by participants. Select two or three thought-provoking questions.

14. Announce the end of the question time after 2 minutes. Display a slide saying, "Quiz Contest".

15. Say, "I am going to read one of your open-ended questions. If you wrote the question, you cannot answer it. The other participants should type an appropriate response. Remember that there is no correct response. We are looking for your thinking skills and imagination. Don't type more than three lines."

16. Read one of the questions from the participants. Wait until you have four answers.

17. Display a slide that says "STOP!"

18. Read the first four answers and ask the participants to listen carefully. Identify the first answer as A, the second as B, and so on.

19. Display a polling slide with the letter A, B, C, and D. Ask participants to vote for the cleverest answer among the four that you read. Read the answers again if necessary. Do not display the poll results until you close the poll.

20. Display the poll results. The percentages are the numbers of points awarded to different respondents.

Repeat

21. Display the next paragraph to be read.

22. Repeat the closed- and open-question quizzes.

Recognize This?

If you are familiar with my games, you will recognize this as an Internet version of TEAM QUIZ and FAST GRAB.