Using Edlines Discussion Boards

Edline is an interactive Web 2.0 tool depending on how your school sets it up. Some people only associate Edline with parents and students seeing their grades. Edline has other features I use in school with my students. For example, I have started to use with them discussion boards. The screen shot below is my class playing Jeopardy. Before you do any kind of online line discussion board with your students, you will need to go over the rules for posting. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=61808 is a link to the ABC news posting etiquette. This can be helpful because it will allow students to see what standards adults are held to in the real world.

So I had two teams set up in my class. Each class got to use a laptop to submit answers. The first major problem I ran into was that the board is designed to be asynchronous. My intention was to have students post responses and refresh the page to see who posted first. The problem was that refreshing did not fix it. I could only see the team responses when I submitted a new response. That is why you see quotes from me saying “I love this part” and “please be right.” I have emailed Edline to see if they could tell me if I screwed up or this was a technical glitch. My students think that after 20 minutes or so I would see it but I was not willing to wait 20 minutes for this to happen.

The nice thing about this discussion board is that you have the option of customizing several features. I like the fact that I can have the same discussion board in all of my Geometry classes or just one class. I also like how the visibility can be set so only students of certain groups can see the discussion board. This could be helpful if I was looking for an extra credit question or if one class gets a head of another with pacing the behind class cannot look up the answers.



Any ideas of what I could do to improve the Jeopardy game? I was afraid that originally the requiring approval would take to long during a class game.