Online Tools for Education: Piazza Student Forums

Piazza provides forums for students. When helping with teaching this has been typically used for teachers to send out announcements, and for students to ask questions, typically about administration of a course, rather than the content. Like Slack, Piazza can be confusing, with messages popping up in different forums. A particular annoyance are the semi-anonymous posts. This is used so that students do not feel so reluctant to ask a question. However, I am training professionals, who need to learn to seek information from colleagues.

EdTech Overload

Recently I agreed to tutor some student groups in an innovative new program. The catch is that as well as the usual tools (Moodle and Mahara), this is also using piazza.com for student communications and  a Bitnami based Wiki for course materials. It is taking some time to work out how to use each tool and work out what goes where.