Communicative tool

I have learnt that communication is essential for starting and building a successful teaching and learning. Communicative tools helps in enabling easy communication between teachers and students and also among students themselves beyond the physical barrier either by outside the classroom. Some of the examples can be e-mail, electronic bulletin boards, online chat and video conferencing. Utilization of these tools are increasing day by day in the world and coming to our college it has been the most useful tool these days to catch up with the lessons, friends and the tutors.   There are a wide variety of communication tools that are used for external and internal communication and they are classified under two major types. They are synchronous and asynchronous tools.

Synchronous tools are the tools which can also be called real time communication tool. i have realized that the zoom and the video conferences we had all fall under this type. Here the users must be simultaneously connected just like a telephone call where the caller and the recipient should be present on each end. Using this tool we can solve urgent problems or issues. This tool is also used for instructional activities that require higher degree of interaction. Examples can include; chat, video conferencing and video call. The real time communication is also enabled by this tool. For instance; there was a video conference conducted in one of the lessons during ICT module. There I could see my friend and the tutor live. Sir taught us some ways to operate the features of the video conference application. We could learn it on live and it seemed quite challenging of digital immigrant like me.

Video conference with the tutor (synchronous tool)

Some of the challenges of using this synchronized tool are that multiple threads of discussion make us difficult to follow. Sometimes multiple discussions take place and there is a high chance of losing focus and missing out points. This was experienced when I had the video conference with the tutor and my friends in the ICT class. When a person in the group speaks, there was some other whop spoke in between. This gave me a hard time while listening to the tutors instructions. One of the worst challenges is the internet connection. The slow network connection distracts and fails to keep the interest and concentration on track.

The other type of tool is asynchronous. This tool does not need the communicators to be online at the same time. Examples of asynchronous tool include e-mail, vle discussion forum, we chat and blog. Let’s talk about VLE forum in specific. It is a very useful tool and is easy to use as it is primarily text based system. It also provides us with enough time to read the question, analyze it and research the topics to post the most valid and reasonable answers. This type of tool is has more advantages when the activities need more time to think.  

e-mail (asynchronous tool)

The difficulties with this tool are the loss of interest to learn as the answers to the questions are not instant. The response to the questions may have chances to be left unanswered which make the learner feel unimportant and have no excitement to read the other posts as well. Checking the discussion board / VLE / blogs is an additional task. Learners need to check for new posts frequently and it just feels like an extra work discouraging learners to take active participation in the learning process.

VLE discussion thread