Weaving is something that can happen in the middle of a discussion. It is also something that can happen at the end. Any time there is a discussion about a larger issue, it is good to somehow summarize the main points that came up in the discussion. This helps students process the ideas so that they can see what's important and store that information for later use.

This is generally true in discussions that discuss methods or knowledge or anything like that. In a language classroom (unless you are implementing CLIL), the focus might be different. You could summarize the different ways that people used a target structure, or it could be a discussion about a topic and the summary helps point out important vocabulary used in context.

In any case, summarizing the main points at the end helps students learn and provides them with closure, allowing the easy movement to the next topic.

There are many different ways to provide summaries using online tools. You can see some of those ways in the links below. I am including the summaries from last semester, as this semester we have not seen any real discussions.

The most basic way is just to write a summary by hand, either in word processing software (e.g., Microsoft Word) or in the discussion forum directly.

There are also some automatic tools to make these summaries easier. One such automatic tool is Wordle, which is used for the Week 2 Summary (not updated for this semester) below and can be found at wordle.net. There you can enter in any text that you like and the software will automatically create a picture of the words that are most commonly used (automatically taking out words like "the"). You can change the colors or other style things, and if you want you can right click and remove words from the picture.

Another automatic tool was used for the Week 3 Summary (not updated for this semester): QuickSummary. There I just copied and pasted the text from the forums (minus people's names) and the software chose what it decided were the most important sentences and words. You could then choose to use those in your own summary. (The numbers in the Week 3 Summary are from line numbers in the text and aren't very important.)

There are also tools to help you make your own summaries look nicer. For example, the Week 4 Summary (not updated for this semester yet) was created using Prezi, a tool that allows you to create presentations that zoom and look fancy. There are much more fancy examples at the Prezi website, but this is an example of something simple enough to create that still looks impressive.

There are also tools to help you create so-called mind maps. These are organizational tools that help show connections between ideas (I find them invaluable when writing a paper or any other large project). The Week 5 Summary (not updated for this semester) was created using MindMeister, which works online, but there are other programs with more options that you can download onto your computer.

These examples are just to show you possibilities. There are many other possibilities, but they all take some time to learn how to use.

Your tasks for this week are:

• continue providing feedback and points to at least 35 posts (2 points)
• towards the end of the week summarize one discussion that is not the one that you were using for weaving the previous week (2 points)
  • You can create a new topic for this purpose if you wish or chose one that already exists.

There is also the forum for reflections. (You can gain 2 points for an initial post and further two possible points for responses to others).

Week 4 Summary

This week's summary was made with the help of the Prezi tool, which is free for educational use like this.

http://prezi.com/dkap3jue4mg4/week-4-reflections-summary/

Week 5 Summary

This summary was made with the help of the tool Mind Meister.