Online discussions

Lessons learned with online discussions with middle school students on Edublogs

I wanted to give my English students an experience similar to the online threaded discussions I had participated in as part of online classes. These discussions were engaging, rewarding and enriching. And since my students love all things online, I knew they would enjoy the experiment. And since I also teach their daily technology class, we had the time.

I set up a blog on Edublogs (www.mrslo.edublogs.org ) so that my 8th grade Language Arts students could have online discussions about To Kill a Mockingbird. I wanted to give the quieter kids a chance to participate in ways they can’t during face-to-face discussions; I also wanted to give students a chance to think about what they wrote, not just shout out ideas during class. And of course, I wanted to give them another reading and writing experience. At the same time, I wanted to keep them safe from strangers online, and from each other (since middle school kids can be ruthlessly mean).

Since students don’t have school emails in my school, and not all have personal emails, I used the gmail workaround to create dummy email addresses. The whole business of setting them up was very time-consuming. (James, are you listening?) If you are an elementary school teacher with 20 kids, that’s fine, but secondary teachers like me have 80-150 students, making this just too impractical. I had to limit this to my two 8th grade classes, much as I would like to expand it to all my students. I’m an Edublog supporter, so I was able to bulk-add students to my blog. But first, I had to set each student up with an individual userid (which I created, using first 3 letters of first name + first 3 letters of last name) and password (which Edublogs created) and then a dummy gmail email account. One at a time. (If you think I could have given them careful directions that they listened to patiently and followed precisely, you have not done much work with 13 year olds.)

I did not want to have to monitor students’ personal blogs, only to have an online discussion. As middle school kids are less than mature, I needed a platform where I could moderate all student work before it was published; the moderating comments function works efficiently and effectively on Edublogs (thank you, James!)

I told students to change their passwords to something they would remember on first log in, since the initial assigned password is not memorable. Problem number two came when students forgot their passwords. I couldn’t get at the passwords, though some students were able to get an email sent (to my gmail) resetting the password. It’s easy to say the teacher should keep track of the passwords, but that’s not practical – they tell you the wrong information, they forget on the way to telling you, they decide to be stinkers and “forget.”). The forgetful students ended up having to be like the students who didn’t have parental permission to participate in the online discussions: reading the discussions, but giving their entries to me on paper.

The logistics were mostly transparent to my students, though, and they loved it. Loved it. Intently made their first post and waited for it to be moderated. Once I returned a few punctuation- and spelling-challenged entries, everybody got more focused on getting mechanics more correct. Then they wanted to see what others had written. They LOVED referring to each other’s comments (and of course being referred to).

The first question I posted taught me a lot about what works and doesn’t work; don’t give a choice of two questions to answer – you can’t get a conversation going. With the second question we discussed, I added a “landscape post” midway through; this helped them focus their followup comments. By that time, they were asking in our “real” class when we would have another online discussion and referring to parts of their online discussion. They also wished we had done it earlier in the year during other projects, which prompted a discussion of wikis and how we could use them for our mock trial teams.

Afterwards, I asked students to tell me what they liked and what they would change. They enjoyed the deeper discussions, the chance for everybody to participate, the chance to think. They wanted more questions, but without an arbitrary word count. They felt they “just wrote” to get to the 200 words needed for an A, and pointed out that if they have something effective to say in 100 words, why should they write more? They also found having to post twice about each question artificial; I had enjoyed that in my adult discussions, but this didn’t always work so well with these younger students. They – and I – felt that having two classes work together was too much, also – there were just too many posts to read. So next time I’ll have each class do its own discussion (though they’ll be able to peek at the other class’ work). And they can write shorter posts and will only have to post once for each discussion (but can post more often if they choose).

Yes, moderating and then grading the discussions was extra work. But quieter thoughtful students did get to take part, students did think more deeply, and everybody got to participate, not just the most energetic hand-wavers. Will I do it again? Yes, and earlier in the year, so we can include these discussions throughout the year.

Special thanks to Sue Waters (www.theedublogger.edublogs.org ) and others at Edublogs for their ideas, technical assistance, and encouragement.

Any other experiences, ideas????