Blogger

Having students discuss topics via a blog platform such as Blogger allows students to express their own thoughts and potentially develop a deeper understanding of the content by reading their classmates' responses to prompts and responding to their peers accordingly. This method can be used to cover a diverse range of topics and encourages thoughtful discussions between all students.

Parlay

The Parlay RoundTable I modified for my students covers seven elements of music. This is a great way to provide students with a compilation of resources that reinforce understanding of the concepts. The assignment in this example asks students to share a favorite song and discuss what they enjoy about the song while incorporating vocabulary from the lesson. Using this platform, students can see which other students may have similar musical tastes to their own; conversely, it can also be a great way to expose students to genres or artists they might not have elected to listen to on their own. This assignment and platform encourage students to discuss what they might like or dislike about a piece of music in an informed way using appropriate musical terminology.

Additional Tool: spiral

Spiral includes several ways to deliver content to students, to have them work independently or collaboratively, and to assess students. Spiral's features include platforms for a verbal Q&A, a multiformat quiz, an interactive presentation, a video Q&A, and a collaborative project (called "Team Up," which is the one I chose to use in my sample). In the above example, students would be sorted into four teams where each team has specific objectives (I chose the instrument families of the orchestra). Via this platform, students can collaboratively create a presentation and present it to the class, and the teacher can easily view students' progress on their presentations in real time.