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Kialo Edu
Pros: Fosters a variety of useful participatory skills. More organized than a discussion board. Easy to filter individual student contributions.
Cons: A dizzying amount of features, functionality, and menus. No rubrics or rubric feature.
Bottom Line: A valuable platform for students to learn about social and political issues while practicing digital citizenship and argumentation.
The beauty of Kialo Edu is its versatility. Though it's possible to create public discussions, most teachers will opt for private discussions and organize students into mixed ability groups (teams) to ensure that different viewpoints are equally represented. Kialo can function as a place for debate of societal or political issues, but it can just as easily be used to discuss character motivation in a novel or the ethics of scientific research, or to help a class make a decision about something as simple as where to go on a field trip. Students can even use Kialo to organize and visualize their ideas and arguments for essays, presentations, projects, and live debates. Most of all, though, it's an ideal platform to practice having reasoned, respectful discussions and making arguments with reasoned evidence and analysis.
Teachers should consider focusing their instruction and assessment on skills beyond the pros and cons contributions. For instance, teachers can encourage students to get active in the comments nested within each pro or con. It's here that students discuss individual contributions or provide sources to further establish or debunk claims. Focusing on this layer of detail will help students see how claims must be backed up -- and that moderation is an important part of healthy online discussion.
Teachers will appreciate the many different forms of formative or even summative assessment that Kialo makes it easy to use. Teachers could develop a set of rubrics that look at things like:
- Students' use of evidence and examples
- Whether comments build on those of other people
- Whether responses to other participants address their arguments directly
Thankfully, it's easy to filter each student's individual contributions to see where and how they've participated, to jump to those specific contributions, and then provide feedback in context.
Kialo Edu is the educational companion to Kialo, a free website designed to foster thoughtful debate and discussion of complex issues. Kialo Edu has been designed specifically for classroom use and allows teachers to create debates accessible only to their own students. More importantly, teachers can organize students into teams so that they can research, plan, and organize their ideas for an ongoing online debate. If you have multiple groups or sections, it's easy to duplicate the discussion/debate in order to have smaller group sizes.
Once the debate or discussion is created, students can join without an email address (no personal information to give). Then students post claims (pro or con) and can either respond to each other's posts or add new claims. Each of these claims can have further claims nested within, and students and teachers can add comments to claims. As a teacher, you can moderate the discussion and provide feedback to students about their ideas, the structure of their arguments, or even the quality of their research. Handy visualizations offer a snapshot of how the argument is playing out and which claims are getting the most votes. Features like impact voting can help students see how effective their claims are.
Kialo Edu is a highly useful tool for helping students develop skills essential for civic participation. Students must use critical thinking skills to evaluate information and social and emotional skills to understand different points of view. Students also must back up claims with reasonable evidence to convince others involved in the debate of the veracity of the claim: a tremendously valuable skill that begins in elementary school and carries through all the way to 12th grade. Teachers can also easily create discussions that extend beyond traditional arguments, using the platform for fun conversation or even as an outlining tool for essays.
While almost every LMS offers discussion forums, Kialo Edu's interface is far better-suited to organizing and assessing ongoing discussions of contentious issues. The site creates an environment for students to share ideas, validate sound arguments, and really "listen" to each other -- something lacking in a lot of social discourse online. The visualization and nesting of claims also clearly models how arguments are built, and the clear tracking and filtering of individual students' contributions makes it easy for teachers to get a bird's-eye view of the full spectrum of student participation.
Currently, Kialo focuses just on offering the platform for having discussions, so teachers will still need to scaffold the experience with curriculum and rubrics that help students recognize good arguments, use evidence, and disagree without disrespecting others' viewpoints. It'd be great if Kialo offered supports for this in the future. It'd also be interesting if students could add media -- along with links -- to claims. Still, as it stands, Kialo Edu is an easy-to-recommend and incredibly well-thought-out platform that teachers will find useful.
Learning Rating
Overall Rating
good product, but still need to improve
As a newcomer to Kialo Edu, I've been both intrigued and challenged by this unique platform for classroom debates. The user interface is quite intuitive, which was a relief for me as a first-time user. The structured presentation of arguments and counterarguments is particularly helpful, offering a clear view of the debate landscape. Engaging in these discussions has been a refreshing change, encouraging me to think more critically and consider a broader range of perspectives. However, the platform can feel a bit overwhelming with its detailed structure, especially for those not used to this type of analytical tool. I found myself spending significant time just figuring out how to navigate the various arguments effectively. Additionally, while the platform excels in organizing debate, it sometimes lacks in facilitating more dynamic, real-time interaction, which can limit the flow of discussion.
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