Discussion Boards...good or bad?

Enhancing the Classroom with Discussion Boards
-Promotes interactive participation from entire class
-Encourages students to work together while sharing ideas through interactive discussion
-Potential for creating online study groups and peer tutoring
-Gives students time to critically consider their thoughts, before posting
-Teachers can monitor where students are finding online information and help but adding threads to encourage alternate sites to check out. Thereby exposing students to sites that they may not have considered otherwise.

Pros
-Creates a sense of community
-Allows for a number of opinions to viewed at one time
-Supports the use of problem solving skills, personal inquiry and teamwork
-Can work well with face-to-face discussions
-Way of sharing information
-Highly interactive
-Geared towards continuous learning for students as well as teachers
-Support service

Cons
-Trouble with accessibility (computer access)
-Lacks face-to-face interaction
-Only able to share interactive resources
-A constant need for teachers to monitor student’s actions (ex. Research)
-Potential trouble giving feedback due to the limit of only being in written form