Brainstorming
 Traditional brainstormingThere are many ways to brainstorm. As a teacher, you may traditionally put students into discussion circles and provide graphic organizers.
FirstClass brainstormingOnce you've taught students how to brainstorm, you can let them use FirstClass to gather at their convenience and conduct their own brainstorming sessions. You can put your graphic organizers online and let students print them out or complete them online within their own project conferences.
Just as there are many traditional ways to brainstorm, there are also many ways to do it using FirstClass.
• Students can meet in a public instant messaging session, instant message each other on the fly, or meet in a discussion conference. In an instant messaging session, team members can throw out ideas while the secretary records them in the graphic organizer, or the secretary can use the autogenerated transcript later to compile the ideas.
Take a look at a sample brainstorming session conducted through instant messaging.
• If students are using a discussion conference, they can throw out ideas and others can expand on them.
Take a look at a sample conference used for brainstorming. Two conversations (or brainstorming sessions) are occurring, and they are organized by subject using the threading feature.
• They can take turns opening the graphic organizer and adding to it, building on each others' ideas.
This is a sample graphic organizer. It is a web diagram that can be used for brainstorming.
 FirstClass makes sure every person's ideas are recorded, regardless of where people are located. It lets people contribute ideas from any location where they have an Internet connection, either simultaneously, or whenever they are ready. You don't need to have everyone gathered around their own computers at the same time. One person posts a message when they are online, and as others log in, they can add their own comments. Threading keeps each discussion together.
The next stepOnce students have completed a brainstorming session, they need to divide their tasks. FirstClass is an excellent task management tool.
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