The chat tool may generally be used for rich, rapid feedback from students. It may help some students overcome technophobia and it promotes active learning. Be aware that the chat tool chat tool is aimed towards verbal and social learners and favors fast typists with good English skills. You may not want to use the chat tool for your most vital learning, and for some classes you may want to use the discussion tool for student interaction. The chat tool can nonetheless be very effective. Your facilitation of chat rooms, as listed in the tips below, can help maximize its effectiveness.

1. When several students are logged on in a discussion, you may have students use symbols such as "~" or "?" to indicate a comment or question. You may then call on them as if in a face-to-face classroom. If using multiple symbols or abbreviations in your chat room, provide a chat glossary for your students.
2. If you or your students have long comments to type, consider breaking them up into chunks and separating each chunk with an ellipse ( . . . ).
3. Remind students that the same "rules" that govern in-class discussions should also govern virtual discussion, e.g. it's OK to disagree, but not to be disagreeable, etc.
4. To begin a chat room session, you may pre-compose "canned" topics or discussion headers using a word processor and then cut and paste them into a chat room. Simply paste the text into the "Enter your message below" box and hit <enter> or <return> on your computer keyboard.
5. Guest speakers could interact with your class through the chat tool. Have students prepare questions in advance.
6. Logged-on but non-participating chat roomers are called "lurkers". Take the effort to determine why they are not participating.
7. Use the chat tool for virtual office hours. Activate the chime tool so you may work elsewhere on your computer and be alerted when students "drop by."
8. The chat tool can be particularly helpful for group work, brainstorming, and continuation of interesting classroom discussions.
9. Assign a greeter during a class chat. The greeter can highlight names of late-comers and post necessary information as a private message. The rest of the class will not view private messages and the log will not record them.
10. If a student has an excused absence for a chat session, post the chat log for him/her.
11. If you have two separate courses that need to collaborate, use the general chat for all WebCT users.