 Hi, my name is Robert Apino, I work as a technology coach and a teacher in middle school at Saigon South International School. I'm really excited to be contributing to K-12 online this year and look forward to all the connections, participations and conversations in it too. So thank you very much and hope you enjoy it. This presentation is called Speak Up, Transforming Classroom Discussions. Again, my name is Robert Apino. You can find me on Twitter at Rapin01. Here's a snapshot of where I work in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This is the high school building, which is the main entrance to the campus. We have over 35 nationalities with 850 students from early childhood to grade 12. One of our principals is actually waving on the far right and in through the campus. And consider this idea, some students enjoy speaking up in class while others don't. This is a scenario that most educators are familiar with. How can we promote more students to share their ideas? In this presentation, I will briefly present research on face-to-face and virtual discussions. My overall goal with this is to encourage educators to try different ways to reach their students through different modes of class discussions. The research. I conducted an action research on face-to-face whole class discussions compared with virtual whole class discussions. There were 21 students that were part of this study. Face-to-face discussions. Just to clarify, face-to-face discussion is when people have a discussion while occupying the same physical space. Virtual discussions are class discussions in a virtual space such as a Moodle forum, shared Google Doc, Titanpad, a blog, or any other virtual space that promotes discussion. In this study, 21 students in my class were participants in both the face-to-face discussions and the virtual discussions. My research question was, what is the effect of virtual discussions on students' participation and sense of belonging? I wanted to know if students would feel more comfortable participating in virtual discussions versus face-to-face discussions. The reason I chose to do this study was because in my class of 21 students, 14 were male students and they tended to dominate face-to-face classroom discussions. In contrast, I observed that the quietest female student during class discussion was actually the most active blogger in the class and had a lot of valuable thoughts to share. So I wanted to see if it was possible to replicate the feeling of comfort to share ideas when writing in her blog. My idea was to give the students both modes of discussion as a way to better communicate their thoughts. In this next part, I would like to give an overview of the literature on face-to-face discussions compared with virtual discussions. German Lim and Carpenter, introduction, pedagogy, education, and innovation in virtual worlds say virtual worlds will be used more for teaching and learning in the future. We've already seen this trend increase in recent years. Friedman, Carneal, and De Nere's study comparing group discussion in virtual and physical environments found that students had a higher number of on-topic discussions in the physical discussion setting. I was interested in their findings that highlighted that face-to-face interaction resulted in higher frequency of on-topic discussion. Friedman et al. set up the 3D virtual world second life for students to be anonymous. Second life is a 3D virtual world which enables users to create their own virtual persona and potentially interact with other virtual personas. This was used to gauge on-topic virtual discussions. The limitation of this study is that students wore a virtual mask, so to speak. Thus, they may have felt that their actions were not as accountable as in the face-to-face class discussions. So, although students were conducting discussions in both settings, they were more likely to go off task when adopting their virtual mask. Carnegie's study, teaching a critical understanding of virtual environments, found that virtual discussions provided more opportunities for quieter students. Carnegie acknowledges that the biggest advantage of virtual discussions was for students who were shy, self-conscious, or intimidated in face-to-face group meetings. This study enabled me to realize that virtual discussions were a means of encompassing the broader needs to accommodate students to feel nurtured and valued in the classroom environment. Susan Cain, the author of Quiet, establishes the fact that extraversion, or the cult of personality in the US, wasn't always valued the way it is today. She demonstrates how this historical change came about, and highlights how the power of personality, or extraversion, came to be the cultural ideal in the US. In her book, she skillfully demonstrates that introversion is not a negative quality, rather, this is seen as time for careful consideration. For example, she details the background of Steve Wozniak and other so-called introverted people who became publicly successful due to their creativity fueled in their quiet moments. She also highlights the ways in which Asian American students engage in school and college life. In her research, she found that most Asian students preferred the introverted mode of interaction, and for various reasons were more comfortable using this mode of communication. The research and underpinnings in her book were of interest to me because of the parallels I could see in my own classroom. Susan Cain confirms this idea by explaining that quiet students feel comfortable collaborating in an online working group, which is similar to a virtual discussion because it is a form of solitude, which better meets the needs of more introverted learners. In this way, the book quiet is a breakthrough in understanding that introversion is not a negative quality, and that extroversion is not the ideal. Wang and Wu's 2007 study comparing asynchronous online discussions and face-to-face discussions in a classroom setting said, in terms of authenticity, face-to-face discussions were more real and authentic. However, Wang and Wu also said that online discussions were more comfortable, less aggressive, and offered more equal opportunities for group members to voice their opinions. To summarize my results, what I found in my study was that student participation increased in virtual discussions. Also, the quality of participation increased in virtual discussions, meaning students stayed more on topic in virtual discussions. It was interesting what was confirmed in my overall findings. In virtual discussions, female students were freed from the constraints they felt from whole-class discussions, which was dominated more by the male students. In the virtual context, they were able to be more active participants in discussion and had a higher frequency of on-topic discussions. Additionally, some male students that reacted without thinking during face-to-face discussions had a higher frequency of on-topic discussions in virtual discussions. This could be due to the fact that virtual discussions have a lasting digital footprint and the students have a growing understanding of the implications of this. Also, virtual discussions require students to reread what they are going to say before they post it. Perhaps because they are writing instead of speaking, students were more careful with what they were going to say so they could communicate more effectively. This could be something to follow up on in a future study. Many educational conferences at this point in time include face-to-face interaction. This conference, K-12 Online, is a virtual space for educators to interact, share, and learn. We still have discussions and conversations virtually through comments in the K-12 Online website, Twitter, and other means. At physical conferences we attend face-to-face presentations, have keynotes, have face-to-face discussions, but we also discuss via hashtags on Twitter and other networks. So perhaps in the future we will continue to see a rise in virtual conferences. I would highly recommend integrating virtual discussions into your classrooms and suggest that you experiment in finding a balance that fits the needs of your particular class. Here are some useful tools to help you integrate virtual discussions into your classrooms. All of these tools are user-friendly and have a variety of advantages. An easy tool to start with is Google Docs because you can include a discussion question in the Google Doc and use the chat function to discuss while students are logged into the doc. If you are interested in the methods and specific findings from my Action Research paper, please click on the link to the full research paper. References from my paper, image attributions, you can follow the links in this presentation via rapino.com and get your students to speak up and transform your classroom discussions. If you want to contact me you can find me on Twitter or via my website. Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this conference.