There are two types of Salons. The discussion salons and comprehension salons. You will be
able to designate a salon as discussion or comprhension and change it anytime. Each mode
gives a unique set of tools to conduct salon activities and measure student contribution.
Discussion Salons: Ideal for areas where interpretation, discussion and discourse
are more important to capture. Discussion salons encourage "deep" discussions and use analytics to understand which
threads are more active. The goal in these salons is to find active threads and get more
student participation. You can also reward students for initiating thoughtful threads.
Comprehension Salons: Ideal for areas where comprehension is important. For example
we may expect a chemistry student to be able to correctly describe the meaning of a concept and
demonstrate how to apply it. This may indicate a comprehension level for the student.
Using tag based annotations and filters you can discover
conceptual (mis)understandings of course content. This is ideal for conducting
flipped classes as one can design pre-class activities to encourage active engagement.
If you are interested,
sign up for the course that teaches you how to use
analytics to drive flipped instructions.
One of the most new and innovative features is the ability for each student to select their
own network. Students simply go to salon page and choose other members they want to most
frequently interact with. As students visit, documents and videos with annotations, now they
have the ability to their network comments (choose from dropdown menu) and just focus
on those interactions. Students can choose their own networks or follow system recommendations
based on some of the
innovative research done at Princeton University.
Starting Fall 2014, you will be able to upload your PDF files into salon. You can provide
regional annotations on PDF and most filters and other features will still be functional.
Stay tuned for more information.
As the salon owner/instructor, now you have the ability to just highlight a text or video frame
and add a comment and designate that comment as a "local prompt". Local prompts are a great
way to get students to pay attention to important parts of the text or video.
Local prompts are "reusable" and you can carry them from semester to semester (with tags
and global prompts) as part of your annotated collection.
We are working on improving student feedback by providing intangibles such as effort, helpfulness, thought leadership and consistency based lots of salon data points combined with sophisticated text analysis. Prior studies done as part of the Gates Foundation funded projects have shown that these indicators are strongly correlated to students final grade in class. Students now will be able to see where they stand in the course every time they log into classroom salon.