In adapting Kialo for use in classrooms and other education settings, we’ve built several tools that make it easier for teachers (and students) to use the platform. These tools are designed to meet the unique needs of educators and make processes you’re likely to need to use regularly easier, saving you time when you use Kialo.
Discussion-Related
These tools make using discussions in a classroom setting easier.
- Display Claim Authors: Adds a header above each claim, displaying which user created or linked the claim. This makes it easy to see who contributed which claim in each location - especially useful for grading.
- Student Tasks: Lets you set goals for students to complete in a specific discussion. Especially useful if you're using Kialo Edu for the first time with a class or group of students.
- Teacher Feedback: Allows you to give students feedback directly on their claims, with feedback hidden from students until you’re ready to reveal it to them.
- Discussion Activity List: Shows you a real-time list of all changes and comments made in the discussion, in reverse chronological order. Can also display which students have or haven’t voted on which claims. Useful for grading.
- Vote Visibility: Allows you to adjust the visibility of votes on claims for students, hiding how other students have voted. As a result, students can’t simply vote the same way other students have.
Administrative
These tools make it easier to organize your students, helping to sort them into teams, and invite them to discussions.
- Teams: Teams let you split up a large group of students into smaller groups. Smaller groups allow more individual input from each student and are ideal for graded assignments, allowing for more in-depth discussions tailored to your planned assignments. Teams can also be reused - they only need to be set up once if you plan on using the same groups again.
For information on how to use teams to split up large classes, see Organizing Students into Groups on Kialo. For guidance on how large (or small) teams should be for your assignment, see Using Kialo with Large Groups of Students. - Team Allocation Link: Creates the number of teams you specify and generates a link which, when clicked by students, distributes them evenly across the teams. Useful to easily create evenly-sized student groups that can then be used with the Clone and Invite Wizard.
- Team Invite Links: Creates a link that you can share with your students which, when clicked, will let your students join the respective team.
- Clone and Invite Wizard: Clones a discussion the number of times specified and invites separate teams to each cloned discussion - allowing you to get multiple different student groups into their own copies of your discussion.
- Discussion Access Link: Generates a link that can be used by anyone to view your discussion as a guest, without needing to input their usernames or email addresses. Especially useful to provide to students who haven’t yet created Kialo Edu accounts.
- Email-less Signups: If you want students to create an account without providing an email address, you can instruct them to check ‘Sign up without providing an email address’ during sign-up. Students must create accounts if they want to make contributions to a discussion as otherwise grading would be impossible - educators won't know which contributions were made by which students. Students also wouldn't be mentionable in a discussion.
- Managed Accounts: Allows teachers or institutions to manage students' accounts, including creating new accounts, password management, and deleting accounts from Kialo Edu.
For more information, we’ve written a collection of guides to help with getting started Using Kialo in Class.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or feedback. Your feedback is extremely valuable and helps us develop the right tools and features to improve your experience using Kialo Edu.