To begin, we'll start with some background on a challenge I faced last year with this very class.
Successful online learning and engagement depends on having a way for participants to exchange ideas with others and discuss the class topics. Many of our teachers are using the discussion feature of their SWIFT sites to host online discussions with students. Some teachers use it as homework prior to an in-class discussion and some as a way to extend lessons beyond the school day. If you want to learn more about using the discussion feature of SWIFT, see page nine of the SWIFT User Guide. One of the limitations of the SWIFT discussion feature, however, is that the discussions aren’t threaded. This means that as students post comments, the comments simply appear in chronological order, making it difficult for a student (or the teacher) to respond to a particular comment that may have appeared early on in the discussion. Threaded discussions allow people to respond to particular comments; they allow the conversation to branch off into different directions.
This is how it happened: Last year when we started this class, I knew Blogger didn’t offer threaded discussions, but I figured that I’m not the only person who wished it did, so I Googled “adding threaded discussion to Blogger.” That led me to a blog post about third party applications I could add to the blog to increase interactivity. That’s where I learned about Intense Debate—the application I’m using to provide threaded discussion for our class on this blog. Within 15 minutes I had followed the step-by-step directions for editing the blog template, copied and inserted the HTML, and—voila!—we had threaded comments on the blog. Did I really know what I was doing? No. I don’t know HTML. I don’t know how to edit a blog’s internal template. But I do know how to search for an answer to a question/challenge I have AND I know how to follow directions. That’s all it took.
So, that's this week's theme: If you believe it should be possible, it probably is—all you have to do is look. I offer this anecdote as evidence that there is a solution out there for most of our challenges if we look and are willing to invest in a little risk taking. If I had seen this issue as a problem, I might have just begrudgingly accepted my plight (no threaded commenting) and would not have investigated further. However, I felt comfortable taking matters into my own hands and did some self-directed learning—something I think we (and our students) are going to be expected to do more and more of in this new digital world. In my role, I am confronted by this reality day after day, yet every time I am amazed and delighted. What about you?
a. Share a time you went online with a question/challenge and “taught” yourself how to do something new.
OR
b. Do it now . . . what’s a question/challenge you have in your class right now? Go online and look for your solution. How did it go?
