How can you get your students to have a robust online discussion that goes beyond, "Good post!" or "I like that!"? Education technology coordinator Jennifer Stewart-Mitchell offers up strategies on deepening discussions online with digital book clubs. Blogging, memes, video, and more enhances creativity and thoughtful response.

What does it take to make online discussions work? Educator Michael B. Sherry offers three strategies for addressing the challenges of online conversations and engaging students in going deeper in their digital discussions.

This book provides teachers and parents with the 'need-to-knows' to educate groups of young people about consent, pornography, sexting and many other related topics, as well as giving them the tools to ward themselves against abusive behaviour. Initiating a discussion with young people on topics around sex can seem daunting, but "Talking…

The relationships between social network centrality, social construction of knowledge, and nurse practitioner competency among adult gerontology acute care nurse practitioner students participating in asynchronous online discussions were explored. Social network centralities (betweenness, in-degree, out-degree, closeness, and eigenvector) were…

This study examined the impact of instructional conversations about peer observations on the collaboration and perceptions of teachers at a western New Jersey middle school. This study's impetus comes from previous work of the same impact on an elementary school in Pennsylvania. The study focused on these conversations' reflective nature, and the…

Purpose: After interviewing teachers about their beliefs on discussion, the author observed four English teachers as they led class discussions. The purpose of this study is to see what kinds of discussion were happening, and what teachers were doing to facilitate those discussions. Design/methodology/approach: The author observed six English…

One of the main characteristics of distance education is the absence of face-to-face interaction with instructor and learner as well as learner and learner. The purpose of this article is to explore the issue of social presence and the various innovations used to foster a social presence with distance education programs.

The authors share an activity in which two fifth-grade teachers and one sixth-grade teacher received book talk videos via Flipgrid from preservice literacy teachers and watched the videos with their students. Students responded with feedback and suggestions for how to better represent each book. The authors compiled and coded students' comments…

The authors (two classroom teacher researchers and two university researchers) explore the potential of improvisational teaching for justice-oriented literacy instruction with adolescent youths. In the aftermath of racial unrest and student activism at the University of Missouri and when faced with the emerging confusions among students in…

Our investigation focusses on a group of eleven lower-middle-class students from classrooms in which the teachers did most of the talking and students rarely asked any questions. We have examined whether spontaneous discussions among the students in a less structured setting would include questioning, and what kinds of questions they might ask.…

Students frequently struggle to understand the differences among various types of organizational structures and how these differences affect organizational processes and outcomes. In the exercise described in this article, students are given a list of jobs from a medical rehabilitation center and asked to create an organizational chart. Students…

In the last few years, social learning, i.e., learning based on the analysis and discussion of topics by means of social collaborative systems, mainly social network services such as Facebook or Twitter, has acquired a great importance and led many instructors and institutions to deploy courses that include activities to be performed in them. For…

In this study, we explore the potential of a natural language processing (NLP) approach to support discourse analysis of in-situ, small group learning conversations. The theoretical basis of this work derives from Bakhtin's notion of speech genres as bounded by educational robotics activity. Our goal is to leverage computational linguistics…

The 'Future of Jobs' report from the World Economic Forum highlights that creativity is one of the most important skills needed by the workforce. One way of enhancing the creativity of students undertaking STEM subjects is by taking inspiration from design disciplines. The product design curriculum has creativity at its heart and follows a product…

There is substantial evidence to suggest that social interactions, and discourse in particular, are the strongest drivers of learning (National Academies 2018), suggesting that teachers need to promote productive talk in their classrooms (NRC 2012). While the "Next Generation Science Standards" practice of "obtaining, evaluating,…