Schoology Discussions in Science

My class has been using Schoology as our classroom Learning Management System all year.  It has so many great features that makes it easy to gather work, give quizzes, give students feedback and communicate with my students.  The feature that I have been exploring lately is the discussions.

Jennie Magiera shared her love for this feature with me a while ago, but using it with students has been really powerful.  Setting up the discussion is very easy, it is located in the Resource section, under Personal.  Simply select, name, and post to the course you want to have the discussion.

Students see the discussion as an upcoming event.  Once the students join the discussion they add comments by pressing the plus sign in the corner, or can add comments to other students' posts. The discussion formats to nest the comments under the original post that makes reading and seeing conversations within the discussion easy.

I use discussions for different purposes, but for science I have been using them as my opening KWL idea generator.  We started a Land and Water unit recently and my students brainstormed alone first then added ideas to the Schoology discussion.  They start "know" comments with K: and "want to know" or "wonder" with a W: so we can determine which category the comment belongs under for the conversation.

So far these features are similar to most other discussion tools you could use with students, but the best feature is the "filter by user" tab at the top of the discussion.  This tool allows the teacher to not only see the number of comments by user, but highlights the student's comments to quickly find and view student by student comments.  I used this tool to easily grade 30 students contribution to the KWL conversation and see the quality of contributions.  Some students only had three comments but all were high quality and shared content understanding, another student may have ten comments but are low quality, "I agree," or "I had the same question."  Not only does it make evaluating the discussion easy, it can be used as a coaching tool for students.  Students can learn to be a stronger contributor to a conversation by seeing a filtered view of the bigger discussion.

Unlike other discussion tools, Schoology archives the discussions and they remain available and organized in the Resource section.  These could be used as a portfolio type of item to show a student's growth in discussions over time.   They could also be shared with students who may be absent on the actual day of discussion to review and add ideas after the initial discussion.  I will share the original KWL discussion with students after the unit of study to compare the new concepts and learning.  I want students to be able to see the growth in their understanding from experiences in the Land and Water unit.