A teacher sent me an email this morning asking me to look at the logs for his Moodle site. Yesterday he started a forum on his site for the very first time. He had almost 2000 hits on his site yesterday, in one day! Granted some of theses hits are the same students going to different areas in his Moodle site, but that was still pretty impressive.

I hesitated to look at what the students were actually doing online in his Moodle site. I didn't want find out it was completely unrelated to what they were studying in class. However, when I checked out the forum Joe had started, in regards to the Diet Coke-Mentos experiment, I was pleasantly surprised to see some decent thinking going on as to what else might make Diet Coke take off like the Space Shuttle.  Granted these were not entries that would score on the district writing test, but that was not the point. There was some higher level thinking going on in these students' heads, and they were engaging each other in conversations related to their hypotheses and the scientific method.

For example, one student hypothesized what would happen if you put a Pez candy in a diet coke. The comments and responses other students contributed to this student's thread were in agreement that nothing would happen. One justification by a student was that Pez is covered with a waxy coating and would probably not interact with the Diet Coke.

Lots of good discussions related to classroom instruction all taking place outside of the classroom, on the students' own time, in a medium that they understand and relate to.

Lots of positives related to this type of activity.

- Essentially unlimited amount of time, to a discussion/topic that is interesting to students, but yet would never happen in a classroom for more than maybe a minute. (Too much to teach in 50 minutes to spend 20 minutes discussing the chemical reaction of different candy and Diet Coke.

- Provides an opportunity for students to contribute to a (online) conversation where in a classroom discussion they may not get that opportunity.

- Provides students with an opportunity to take as much time as they like to form an idea and express that idea. Again, this opportunity does not all ways occur in the classroom due to time restrictions.

- Some students may be more apt to participate in a discussion online, than they would in person, orally.

I'm sure there are others positives, but those are just a few off the top of my head.