Regardless of where learning is taking place, it's important for students to "Think [and Talk] About Things." In an in-person classroom, there are few things better than a great discussion. However, upon reflection the in-person discussion may not have been as engaging as we thought. For instance, take a look at the photo below. The instructor is off camera but it looks like a great teacher-directed discussion. I'm seeing SIX hands being raised--WOW! However, another way to look at it is that SIX kids have something to say and may not get a chance to share their thoughts. Three of those students have probably been raising their hands so long that they are using one arm to hold up the other. I also see two students who are drifting off to sleep. Perhaps, they had something to say but gave up.

Online discussions lack the rapid back and forth but their strength is that all students have equal opportunity to participate. Most online discussions are text which can be great for reflective discourse. However, students can get tired of text discussions and it's a good idea to also have them engage in video discussions. Video discussions are becoming more popular with tools such as FlipGrid and VoiceThread.

In an in-person environment if the discussion that you designed flops, you can quickly adjust the activity on the fly. While you can also adjust the prompt online it can be harder to do so. As a result we really need to think a little more carefully about our online discussion questions. Prompts should be open-ended and allow for multiple "correct" responses. Good discussion board prompts also measure higher-order thinking skills. In many ways it's easier to write good discussion prompts that require divergent and evaluative thinking than it is to write good prompts that only require convergent thinking because you don't want the students to arrive at the same conclusion too quickly. See the table at the bottom of this page for some examples. The tables below were obtained from this document (it's worth a read if you have some extra time).

Teachers commonly ask students "post once and reply twice" meaning that they should create an original post answering the teacher's question and then reply to two other students' posts. There isn't anything wrong with that but students may get tired of it if that's all that you do. The VoiceThread below highlights other types of online discussion activities.

FlipGrid has become the most popular video discussion tool because it's 100% free. This Eduptopia article provides nine ways to use Flipgrid in the classroom and if that's not enough this article has fifty. There are really endless possibilities but I just wanted to show you a single video comment to give you a sense for how video communication can bring out students' creativity. I've added the subtitles but everything else was created by the student using Flipgrid.

VoiceThread is different from other video communication tools because the communications happen around some sort of media--commonly presentation slides, images, or video. It's not 100% free but they do have a free-for-teacher account and your school and/or district may have paid for a license. VoiceThread has also created a library of case use examples. The following is my favorite example of a VoiceThread from that library. Fourth grade students wrote letters as if they were living in a Japanese internment camp. They then recorded their letters on VoiceThread. Finally, actual Japanese internment camp survivors responded to some of their letters. The entire VoiceThread example can be accessed here but the video below is my favorite comment from one of the internment camp survivors.