From boardroom to mainstream classroom: Educational informatics to enhance instruction and learning

This paper reports on an investigation into the use of Group Support Systems (GSS) technology to enhance mainstream classroom instruction and enable teacher assessment and evaluation mechanisms. From a social informatics perspective these preliminary findings are reviewed in order to highlight the level of interest being shown in a number of Australian schools. There is much to report with respect to how an informatics can help integrate learning activities within classrooms, schools, and across communities. Moreover, the use of GSS underscores particular social requirements en route to developing learning partnerships between teachers and students P-12. Such initiatives point to advancing curriculum initiatives in literacy and numeracy, critical thinking, and teamwork in classrooms. To shed some light on the application of a media rich approach involving GSS, reference is made to the use of a conversational framework to model instructional practices. Here the classroom is seen as a community of learners adopting an active learning approach by substantially improving the quality of learning by leveraging instructional processes. Aside from gains for students where equal participation and rapid compilation of ideas can support critical thinking, further gains relative to teacher diagnosis and assessment are described.