A simple guide to using Classroom Salon to support discussion in your content classroom.
Step 1. Motivation
One of the key problems educators face is that students often don’t do the assigned reading before class or forget much of what they have read even if they do read. Either situation means that the teacher must work hard during class time to get students to participate in discussion. One teacher described the process of getting students to talk in class as 'pulling teeth.'
Classroom Salon addresses this problem because by annotating the readings before class, students are also building a class discussion. Once class begins, the teacher can use Salon to display the discussion. It's much more comfortable, we have found, for students to talk when elaborating on contributions to the discussion they have already made.
Step 2. Make a Salon for Your Class
Register on Salon and give your students the web-link (classroomsalon.org) so they can register too.
Under the menu item, 'My Groups,' select 'Manage Groups.'
You will see on the right hand panel an area called 'Start a Group.' This group will be your classroom. Fill in a name for your class and then a description. Because you probably teach many classes you may want a different Salon for each of your classrooms, the description can be anything to help you remember one particular class over another.
You will see another field set to 'require approval from the owner.' Don’t change it. You are the owner of any Salon you create and you will want to make sure no students can enter your salon unless they are enrolled for your course and have your permission.
Now hit 'save' to create your Salon.
Congratulations! You have now made your own salon for your class.
Step 3. Enrolling Your Students into the Salon You Created
Your students can’t enter your salon without registering on the system, knowing the name of your Salon, and asking for your permission to be admitted into it. Let’s say your name is Smith and you have created a Salon for your period 3 course called 'Smith_Period_3.' You will want to tell your students in Period 3 that there is a salon waiting for them to join. Give them the website for Classroom Salon. Tell them to register. Tell them to log-in and then put a picture of themselves into the system. Then tell them to go to the menu item 'my groups' and select the option 'join a group.' They will see a list of Salons on the left. Tell them to put 'Smith_Period_3' in the search box and then hit the search button. This will take them to the Salon you set up for their class. Tell them to press the 'join' link side by side with the name of your Salon. This will send a request to you to admit the student into the Salon. To see this request , you need to go to the 'manage group' menu item. You will see on the left hand side a list of Salons already created, including 'Smith_Period_3.' Search for your Salon in the search window. Once you find it, you will see the names of the students who have already been approved into the course and those awaiting approval. Assuming the students waiting for approval are enrolled in your course, you can click the approval button by their name and bring them into your Salon.
Congratulations, you now have a Salon defined for your course and shared with your students enrolled in the course.
Step 4. Uploading Texts to Discuss
A Salon without text is like an IPod without music. To get the Salon going, you need to upload texts into Salon for discussion. If you are teaching a content course, it is likely you will be doing the uploading. If you are teaching a writing course, your students will be uploading their drafts into Salon. Whether it is you or your students doing the uploading, you will all want to upload into the Salon 'Smith_Period_3.'
To upload texts into a Salon, go to the menu item 'My Texts' and select the option 'Create Texts.' You will see a text box on the left hand side. You can cut-and-paste text into this box. You can also read in a Word file if you select on the link 'import text.' Currently, these are the only text formats Classroom Salon supports. Once your text is filling the text box, click 'Create New Document.' This enters your text into the system. You will see the text you just created at the top of your text repository. You will also see buttons for viewing, editing, or deleting your text. To assign the text you just created to 'Smith_Period_3,' click the edit button.
The edit functions give you many options. We’ll just discuss the most important ones for getting on the system quickly.
Managing document questions – here you can write questions you want readers to respond to.
Managing document tags – here you can classify the annotations you want readers to make. In a writing course you might ask readers to make 'content' and 'grammar' annotations. In a content course, you might want readers to make annotations based on the perspective (e.g., 'liberal' and 'conservative') they bring to the text.
Modifying the document group – here is where you assign the text to 'Smith_Period_3.'