In this video I'm going to show you how to have a class debate
online using Kialo Edu. Kialo Edu is a free online discussion platform that can help you
promote critical thinking skills with your students, have them practice using evidence
and reasoning, as well as build their communication and collaboration skills in a digital environment.
Whether you're having students discuss literature, engage in a debate about a contentious topic,
or explore philosophical thought, Kialo Edu is an effective platform for setting up
rigorous online lessons that give students the opportunity to express themselves in meaningful,
engaging ways. My name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
First let's start by going to kialo-edu.com where you can set up your free account. You'll
notice at the top that you have the option to go to kialo.com, which is a different site that
isn't necessarily for education purposes. The debates on Kialo Edu are all private,
so unless you're teaching at the college level, or potentially high school, and want students engaging
in public debates, I'd stick with Kialo Edu. To get started, click on Log In in order to sign up,
which you can do for free. From there, I'll click 'Continue with Google,' but because Kialo doesn't
have single sign-in with Google, you're still going to need to go ahead and set up a username.
And once you've done that and you're ready, go ahead and click 'Sign Up.' Since I just created
this account, my entire teacher dashboard is blank, so let's hop over to this other account,
so you can see what it actually looks like when I've already set up debates and invited students.
Also just so you know, when students log into Kialo, their dashboard will look exactly the same. First
on the Overview tab you'll get a bigger picture of all the debates you're following, posts you've
recently viewed, etc. The Respond tab is important because that's where both you and your students
would see important alerts such as if you've been invited to a conversation or whether or not you've
been tagged in a discussion. The Following tab shows debates that you've been invited to as
opposed to debates that you started on your own, so this tab is most applicable to students. The Own
tab shows you debates you created and the Recent tab shows your most recent activity. The Teams tab
shows you different groups of students and it's probably best to think of teams as classes, though
there's also a way to set it up so that you create different groups within a single class.
Since we're on the Teams tab, let's go ahead and click on this 12th grade class, so you can see
what it looks like. Here you can see all of the debates that this team has participated in. If you
click on team statistics, you'll see the names of each of the members on the team, as well as a big
picture overview of their participation across all of the debates that they've participated in.
So here, for example, you can see that in all the debates he participated in, Leroy made 130 claims,
136 contributions, which also include comments he made, and also voted on 90 other claims.
If you click on the drop down menu next to his name, you can also get a detailed breakdown of his
individual participation in specific debates. Let's jump back over here to the account I just created
and learn how to set up teams of students and how to invite students to your account
so you can start from the beginning. To invite students I'll go back here to the main dashboard
and then I'll click on 'Teams.' Then I'll click 'New Team' to invite a new group of students and
then I'll start by giving my team a name. In this case I'm just going to create a team for my entire
class. I'll call it "11GradeMrKary" and then I'll click 'Create.' Now that I've created a team,
I'll go up here to 'Members' in order to bring students in. One way to get students to join is
to enable the invite link, which will create a link that you can share directly with students
in order to get them to join your team. Note that this is less private because anyone who has
access to the link would be able to click through it and join the team.
Another, more private option would be to invite specific students by inputting their emails
and then clicking 'Invite to team.' Once you've entered a student email and clicked 'Invite,'
they'll be sent an email asking them to join. Regardless of whether or not you share the
link directly with students or invite them to your team, they'll still need to set up accounts
by creating a username and password, just like we did when we set up our own accounts as a teacher.
You can click sign in with Google, but students will still need to set up their own username here.
Once a student has accepted the invite they'll see the team that you created on their dashboard
and they can click 'Accept' to join that team. Now that we've invited students let's go ahead and
set up our debate. So to do that I'll go up here to 'Create a new Discussion.' You'll see that since I'm
on an edu account my only option will be to create a private discussion. Then I'll have the option to
set up my discussion with a single thesis or with multiple theses. A single thesis debate
will include one question with arguments for or against that question. So for example, a single
thesis debate might be, "Is veganism the best diet?" A multi-thesis debate, on the other hand,
includes multiple options. So instead of asking, "Is veganism the best diet," we might ask more
generally, "Which diet is the best diet?" In that case there could be multiple responses with multiple
sets of pros and cons to dispute or support those different arguments about separate diets. I'm going
to go ahead and select 'Single thesis' here and then I'll be prompted to enter the discussion details.
I'll start with the title and here I'll go with a similar theme and ask the question, "Should all
humans be vegan?" And then i'll add some background information. First what I'm going to do is just add
some instructions for students. For example, I'll tell them that they need to write six claims,
that they need to comment on other claims and provide suggestions, and I'll tell them how they'll
be graded. Then I'll also just include some general information about veganism that they can read in
order to help them prepare for the debate. You'll see at the bottom that there's also an option to
change the language of the debate. So if you teach a Spanish class for example and want everything to
be done in Spanish, you could choose that language and set that up instead. And lastly I'll just add
a supporting image here that relates to our debate topic. Okay now that we've created the topic, you'll
see that I'm now in the discussion interface, which will also look the same for students.
If you or your students need support in learning how to use all the different features,
you can click on this question mark and that will pull up blue dots that you can then click on
to learn more about how to use the different features of the discussion interface. At this
point you could either just jump in and have students start writing pro and con claims
or you could provide them with some additional scaffolding and structure the debate more
on your end by pre-writing main pros and main cons that you want them to use during the debate.
Coming up with these main pro and con claims might also be a pre-activity that you do prior
to jumping in and having the actual debate online. I'll go ahead and pre-write three main pro claims
and three main con claims here. To do that I'll click on the green 'Add' button
and then write my first pro claim, "Being vegan is good for your health" and then I'll add a con claim,
"Being vegan is disproportionately expensive." You'll notice on the screen that as I'm adding claims,
they're also showing up on this discussion tree above so you and your students can see
how the debate is developing as new arguments are being added.
And now I'll go ahead and add two more pro claims, "Being vegan is good for the environment" and "Being
vegan is the most ethical choice for humans." I'll also add two additional con claims, "Veganism is a
hard lifestyle to follow" and "Humans should be able to follow whatever lifestyle they want to have."
Notice again how my argument tree is growing now that we've added more pro and con claims.
All right now that I've set up the basic structure of the debate I'm going to share it with my team
of students so that we can actually get in and have a discussion. I'll go to the drop
down discussion menu and then choose 'Discussion Settings,' then I'll choose 'Invites and Permissions,'
scroll down to 'Invite to Discussion,' then choose 'Pick Team' and select the team that I just created.
I'll write a short message introducing the assignment and then click 'Invite.'
Now that students have been invited, they can join the debate and start adding their own arguments
and one of the places where we can look to find the new arguments that they're adding is in the
activity feed. Now that a student has added their own argument we'll also see a blue line showing up
underneath one of the claims so that we can see where new arguments have been added. And when we
click on the claim we'll be able to see whether or not their argument supports the claim or goes
against it and then we'll also be able to see that new argument that they just added show up
in the debate tree above. You'll also notice that this student included a hyperlink to a source to
support the argument that they were making which is something that you could prep students to do
to add additional rigor and make sure that you're teaching students how to back up their claims
with evidence. When you click on an argument you'll see that it produces new pros and cons,
so students can continue to develop arguments for or against the subtopics that have been added.
I showed you how we could find new activity on the activity tab and another place where you
can find new arguments that students are adding is the discussion tree. So if you click on that
graphical representation of the debate you'd also be able to see the new arguments that have been
added. And if you click directly on the icon in the discussion tree it will take you directly
to the argument that a student added, where you can also see the related pros and cons that other
students might have added as well. Then you can also click on the up arrow to move back
up the argument chain in order to communicate with students about the argument that they just created.
You can also chat directly with them by clicking on the argument, scrolling down to 'Write a comment,'
typing @ and then the student's name, and then leaving them a comment. So for example I might
tell Roxanne that she did a great job linking to her evidence here. In addition to writing
their own arguments students can also vote on other students' arguments as well and you can
see the results of that voting represented on the green or red bar above the different
arguments that have been added. To enable voting, go to the three bar menu and select 'Discussion
Settings,' scroll down to 'Discussion Options,' and then select the box that says 'Allow Voting.'
Then as students vote on arguments, you'll see this green bar move to reflect the current status of
the vote tally for that particular argument and when you click on the green bar and then click
on the person icon you can also see a detailed breakdown of how the votes were cast, including who
voted at each level. In addition to voting, you and your students can also mark claims for review. If
a claim has been marked for review, an orange flag will pop up underneath that claim with a statement
about why it was marked for review. Claims can be marked for review by clicking on the claim,
clicking on the tab with the flag icon, selecting why you flagged the claim, for example you might
say that this claim is unsupported, and then also leaving a comment. For example, you might say that
this claim still needs pros and cons to be added underneath it. You'll notice now that I flagged
the claim for review and told the student what they needed to do, that this student reached back
out for help. This doesn't have to be a one-way conversation between the student and the teacher.
Other students can also jump in and converse with each other to figure out how to address the issue.
Of course you could also jump in and continue to add your own suggestions and help as well.
If you choose @reply, that will notify everyone who's either modified or commented on this claim.
You can probably imagine that when students are participating in a group debate they might end
up writing repetitious claims, so another useful feature of Kialo Edu is that it will automatically
detect duplicate claims as students are writing new ones. Here for example if a student starts
writing, "A vegan diet is harmful," they can start to see duplicate claims automatically populate below
to help ensure that they don't repeat the same thing that's already been said.
Back on the discussion home page, we can now see that the debate has continued to unfold
because we can see that new activity on the activity feed, as well as the fact that each
pro and con now has a blue line underneath it, representing that new sub arguments have been
added. Now you might want to see how individual students are participating in the debate,
so one way that you can do that is by going over here to the 'Filter' button and
then selecting the name of the specific student whose participation you want to be able to see.
Then in the activity feed you'll only see the claims and comments that that specific
student has added. You can also get a bird's-eye view of overall participation in the discussion
by clicking on 'Info and Stats' in the discussion menu. Here you can see the discussion topology,
which gives you a visual image of how the debate is unfolding, which will also update in real
time as students add new arguments. You can even click on the individual spaces on the discussion
topography to see the arguments right there. Here we can see the discussion continuing to grow as
students add new information, until we have a fully built out debate with branches of pros and cons
that all lead back to the original proposition. And when you scroll below you'll also be able to see
the overall participation of every student in the class, including the number of claims that they
wrote and the number of times they contributed, which also includes the number of comments that
they made. As you can probably tell, Kialo Edu is a complex, well-designed tool for teaching one of
the most difficult 21st century skills, to teach critical thinking. And although there's a little
bit of a learning curve involved with using it with your students, that's only because it's so
feature-rich. So if you're looking to significantly increase the level of rigor in your classroom,
as well as teach students how to communicate and collaborate when using technology, and use evidence
and reasoning in an authentic context, then I definitely recommend you give Kialo Edu a try. If
you have any questions about online class debates with Kialo Edu or suggestions about how you've
used debates with your own students, I'd love to hear about those in the comments below. Thanks so
much for watching my video to the end. If you're a school leader looking to implement a strategic
technology integration plan I'd love to talk with you about how I can help. I've included a link to
newedtechschool.com in the video description below, where you can book a free strategy session with me.
And if you're a teacher interested in additional guidance for how to effectively use education
technology in your classroom, I've also included a link for you to be able to book a call with me,
so we can discuss how I might be able to help. And lastly if you're interested in my 21st Century
Classroom course, I've also included a link in the video description where you can enter your email
and get the latest enrollment updates. Thanks so much and have a great week!