Teacher Uses Barkles To Initiate Change
At Barkles HQ we love watching the many different uses of our debating platform. One such use is the recent influx of schools (or more notably teachers) creating debates for their students relevant to their classroom material.
We reached out to one teacher, Keith Schoch about the recent debates with his sixth grade students at Bedminster Township Public School. Keith shared some insight into how he came to know about Barkles:
After seeing its mention in a Diigo group, I investigated Barkles after some dissatisfaction with other debate sites which were honestly too clunky, busy, and “full featured” to use with sixth grade students. I know from experience that they will only actively and voluntarily use sites which are clean and straight-forward, without a lot of clutter.
I personally love the ease of sign-up, the intuitive functions, and again, the clean design of the site. My students loved the extended metaphor of the dogfight, barks, bites, dogtags, chasing, throwing a bone, and so on. All of us appreciated how easy it was to follow the threads of votes and comments.
Keiths latest Dogfight; “Bedminster School will start an hour earlier so that the high school can start an hour later." received 33 For and 8 Against amongst his class. He went on to share the reasoning behind the debate:
Our second debate involved a current events issue. After reading that high school students are genetically disposed to later waking hours, students were asked if they would be willing to go to school an hour earlier each day (due to bus conflicts) so that the high schoolers could go an hour later.
A surprising number of students agreed to the change, and by listing their reasons, students were able to begin compiling some support for a persuasive essay they would later be writing. So although the essay would be their own work, the supporting arguments could be gathered through our Barkles crowd-sourcing.
Another interesting thing that we have noticed at Barkles HQ is the self imposed security amongst the sixth grade students for their Barkles Dogtags (see the responses on this Dogfight). Naturally, online security is important to schools and their students and the simplicity of a class/period number and student initials creates a layer of safety and public anonymity. It also allows the other students to focus more on the points of the debate rather than the individuals behind the opinion.
Keith added one last takeaway in response to our 200 character limit when sharing opinions:
The biggest takeaway for students thus far? Sometimes saying less is more. They were shocked to discover that their response space on Barkles was limited, and this forced them to cut to the chase. A good skill to learn and practice in the Twitter age!
Thanks to Keith and other teachers utilising Barkles for their school debates we will be working closely with them to expand our platform to cover these areas properly. If you are a teacher or student looking for a place to host simple and clean debates then try Barkles. We welcome any suggestions or feedback!
- Diesel Laws and the Barkles team.
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