Forums General Help and Improvements!

Hello everyone,

Due to the recent comments that expressed some confusion and concerns regarding the use of the forums I have added a few tools, that together with this post, I hope can help everyone to understand better how to approach this powerful group communication medium.

It shouldn't take more than 5 min to read over the most recent posts or comments in the forums, however it is natural that in the beginning some of you might find it difficult to get used to the graphical interface and information distribution. It is also true that there is a lot of room for improvement and for adding new features but as with any computer system this is always a gradual process where your feedback plays an important role, so I hope to keep hearing from all of you with any comments or suggestions.

I am now going to briefly explain  how you can access and navigate more easily through the forums based on the new blocks or sections you can see on the right area of the website: Active forum topics, New forum topics, Recent comments.

Active Forum Topics

Here you will find all "active" forum topics from any of our 4 defined sections (Teacher posts, Lesson Material, Past Homework, General Help). An active forum topic is one in which there have been contributions or comments written by anyone very recently, in other words, some group discussion is happening in them. Therefore, these are always good topics to click in and check out if you haven't done yet.

New Forum Topics

As the name of this block implies this is where you can directly see what the most recent "new" posts that have been published in the forums are, again, from any of our 4 defined sections. So if you look at this block and see any topic that you don't remember having read then it is a must to check out what it is about, it will take you just "one click"!

Recent Comments

Finally, the Recent Comments block shows a list of all "comments" or in other words,  "replies to forum topics" that students and teachers have written until now. The list starts with the most recent one and if you click on the link "more" you will see an expanded list where you can easily read each of them. This is useful if you want to check in a quick way if you have missed reading any reply by your fellow classmates or teachers.

That said, it might be easier to understand now how quickly you can navigate through the most recent or new information that has been posted in the forums, and at the same time reply to any of them and participate in the group discussions. In the case that you were wanting to start talking about something new then you might want to initiate a new topic, in order to do that, you just have to go to the main forum page "Discussion Forums" under the "Classroom" block, click on "post a new topic" and select the correct category for the subject your forum topic will be about. Then after you have posted your new topic, you can be sure it will appear on the right in the "new forum topics" block where it will be at a one click distance, from any other student.

Hope this helps! Please let me know what you think or if you have any questions, so far, we have had over 16 topics, and 60 comments total of activity in the forums which is not bad for being our first week. We would be happy to see this increasing in the following days.

Hemos estado muy tímidos para escribir en Español, pero no duden en hacerlo si alguien quiere practicar o tiene preguntas sobre esto, quizás escribiendo en Español podamos perder un poco más la pena de escribir en los "Foros" de este curso.

Nos vemos en los foros pronto!

Norberto