Piazza

Piazza is an online site where students can come together to work on a common  question with their instructor’s guidance.  Piazza uses social networking techniques and puts them together to create a tool for learning and understanding.  For example, one can ask a question, another student can respond, and the teacher can approve the response.  However, the same way as Wikipedia, other students can edit the answer until it’s worded perfectly so the other student understands the material better.  It’s like an interactive discussion board that is constantly updated.

            I think Piazza definitely has a future in my area of specialization as an educator.  I plan to teach high school language arts.  Piazza could benefit my students in many different aspects of their language arts education.  An example could be learning grammar.  I could post an example of a sentence and what I want my student’s to find from the sentence.  The student’s could then work together to decipher the sentence and learn from each other.  It could also work with teaching poetry or symbolism in novels.  I could ask my class to figure out the metaphor in the poem or symbols in the novels.  The student’s can work together to come to a student unified answer.

            The only thing I would consider a weakness of Piazza is that I would like to find a way for my students to learn from each other in class, face to face, rather than just over an online tool.  I would like my students to interact in person, as well as over the internet.  Another thing to consider would be the time it takes to teach the classroom how to use Piazza.  Although this is minor, because once the tool is learned, it’s more beneficial for the rest of the class than the time lost learning how to use it.

            I think Piazza would be a really effective tool for classroom management or getting your students to interact and learn from each other.  The tool could be used as a backup explanation from the lesson in class and also a place where students can ask the teacher further questions outside of class.  Maybe they are working on homework at night and need some extra help… all they would have to do is get on Piazza and the teacher would be there guiding and other students there to help.