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.
- Anonymous Discussions: When enabled, students will have anonymous aliases in the discussion. Useful to prevent students from acting on biases, for example, voting favorably on their friends’ contributions. Teachers are able to view the real usernames of students.
- 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.
- Grading and Feedback: Allows you to grade students in a discussion and leave 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.
- Instant Access Discussions: Allow anyone with the link to a discussion to participate, without needing to create a Kialo Edu account. Especially useful to provide to students using Kialo for the first time who do not yet have accounts.
- 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 Invite Links: Creates a link that you can share with your students which, when clicked, will let your students join the respective team.
- Link Sharing: Generates a link that can be used by students to access discussions without needing to be invited. Useful to provide to students who have not been organized into teams.
- Email-less Signups: If you want students to create an account without providing an email address, you can instruct them to click ‘Sign up without email’ when registering an account. 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.
