Turn It In Discussion Board

If you are a high school English teacher in our district, you are most likely already making good use of Turn It In and its many features, but did you hear about the newest feature?

Turn It In now offers an online discussion board!

I had the opportunity to view it in action this week with freshmen; I get to see it with juniors next week...and I am very excited about this new feature!

Why am I excited and using exclamation points? Don't we already have access to online discussions through Google Classroom?

Google Classroom does allow students to have discussions via questions the teacher posts to the stream. Turn It In takes it a few steps beyond the basics, however. Here's what you can do in Turn It In's discussion feature:

• Teachers post questions using a screen similar to posting an assignment. There is a spot for the question, a spot for additional instructions, and a due date.
• Teachers can have multiple questions posted at once, and they are easily viewed on the Discussion page.
• Teachers can chose to moderate posts or not.
• As students post responses and reply to posts, Turn It In visually tracks the thread and labels each response.
• 1 (or another single number) means the post is the beginning of a thread.
• 1.1, 1.2, etc means the posts are responses to the original post labeled 1.
• 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc means the posts are responses to responses to the original post labeled 1.
• (I'm not sure how far down the path it goes, but I did see a 1.1.1.1 yesterday!)
• Teachers can manipulate how they view the posts. They can view the posts threaded (meaning the posts read like a conversation, in the order they were posted) or they can view the posts by student.
• When a teacher sorts the posts by student, the teacher can see both original posts and replies to classmates posts. The student's every contribution shows up. (In contrast, Google only shows a student's original post.)
• Students can post questions if the teacher allows. This could add an interesting dynamic to the conversation.

Thinking of giving it a go in your room? Please let me know how it goes!