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????
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????
Tags: discussion, edublogs, middleschool
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anne Pemberton on
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What a great project! I hope your specific details on what worked and what didn't will help other teachers avoid the pitfalls.
Thanks for sharing! -
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Permalink Reply by Kathy Strathman on
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What a great account of what you did. Thanks for sharing!
I did something similar with my 8th grade science classes. The only difference was that I decided to assign them a user name made up of numbers like sci01, sci02 and so on. I matched a student to each number so I knew who was writing what. I decided to use numbers so I could reuse them again next year and not have to go through the process of basically starting over! I also set up 6 different blogs - one for each class. This way the user name sci01 could be assigned to 6 different students. I am torn whether that was a good idea or not... it seemed to be ok and I could trust the students to not go on other blogs to compose, but the potential was there. It was nice that the google sub-accounts worked so well. I wished that was the same with all the other web 2.0 sites. -
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Permalink Reply by Fran Lo on
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I can see that your use of numbers could really reduce the setup time. I'm going to seriously consider it. Of course, my kids liked their abbreviated names, and could figure out who posted what.
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Hi Fran,
Yes, I could definitely see the benefits in students reading each others' comments and knowing who the author was. I like your idea. It is too bad we couldn't trust all of our students to set it up :-) It would save us so much time.
Another benefit of using the numbers, I felt, was the anonymity gave some of my quieter students more courage to write. (At least compared to how they participated in class.) I wonder which way prevents the potential bullying - numbers or names. I would think names. What do you all think? -
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Good point. I moderated all their comments, so I would be able to cut off potential bullying. Since they knew I would be reading their work before it was published, I think they were more careful. When I experimented with a chat earlier in the year with the same students, they tried out posting all sorts of inappropriate stuff - including name-calling - so there was no way I was going to let them post without moderating first. If you weren't moderating the posts, then the numbers would be a good way of avoiding harrassment. Of course, you can also delete inappropriate posts and eliminate student access, giving you those "teachable moments." I just find middle school kids to be so mean that I want to provide "training wheels" to help them not get the opportunity.
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Yes, I moderated all the comments too, but I did allow a couple "mild" inappropriate comments through. For example, someone made a comment about misspellings. It gave me a teachable moment and we discussed it in class. I also let one through that gave me a teachable moment about how to disagree with the author in a respectful way.
It is all such a great opportunity for the students to learn about how to be good digital citizens, but also for me to allow them the opportunity. It seems like taking a risk, but I think it is worth it. -
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Permalink Reply by Rebecca Ronald on
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Thats a good idea too! My classes seem to forget their login names and passwords every 2 minutes!
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Thank you for this idea!
Rebecca -
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Permalink Reply by Deborah Duncan on
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Fran, What if you established a Wiki page and used the email addresses established by Wiki. I used Wikispaces for the first time this spring and was delighted with the ease that I established wiki accounts and wiki email for my students. I made a list of students and used the school, their last name, first initial for their user name and their birthday as a password. (Example: neshobaduncand 080878) Wiki sent back a list withing 23 hours. I assume the email accounts will work outside of Wiki but I haven't tried it.
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Hi Deborah,
I am unfamiliar with how to set up wiki emails. How is that done? Is that something students can do themselves, or is it something a teacher would do ahead of time? -
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