Online Discussions

Over the past week I spent a lot of time on edmodo.com with my students. In Humor and Satire, the students listened to Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech. After listening to the speech, we used edmodo to have a discussion about the speech. I asked questions like:
-Why is this considered a great speech?
-How does King's speech build up toward the end
-I asked them to discuss certain metaphors and figurative language.
In British Literature, we read a couple of different poems and discussed them on the edmodo. We used edmodo for two different discussions and two different poems.

The use of edmodo added a lot of different voices into the discussion. I asked a question and immediately I had feedback from at least 50% of the students. (That number might have been closer to 70%) I would like to say all of the students, but some were slower in responding and a couple of students slacked. The percentage of student involvement greatly increased through the use of the technology. I love the idea of allowing students a voice. Comparing edmodo to a class discussion, I find edmodo gave all of the students an opportunity at the same time whereas a class discussion only has one voice at a time.

Lunn