Yesterday I had a chance to attend a very interesting presentation by one of my University of British Columbia Colleagues, Dr. Leah Macfadyen, who introduced me to a very interesting tool that you also might want to try. The tool is called SNAPP (Social Networking Adapting Pedagogical Practice) and it was developed by Shane Dawson’s team in Australia. You can find more about it here. The idea behind this tool is to use the tracking information Class Management Systems store (sometimes also called Learning Management Systems, such as Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, etc.) to visualize the interactions your students are having via the Discussion Board. This is especially crucial fro online courses. Notice, if you just go by the number of posts, or the number of messages your students read or write, you might get very distorted information: we all know the quantity is not always the same as the quality. However, if you look at how they interact with other students, how often their posts get responses, you might see a different picture. As soon as I came back from this presentation (around 8 PM), I went to my office to try it out. I wanted to see if my students are actively engaged in the discussion and wanted to make sure I DO NOT MONOPOLIZE the floor. I also wanted to see if I have outliers either falling behind or monopolizing the discussion that I was not aware of. As I am having only 19 students in my class, I feel that I know all of them virtually (I have never seen my students in real life). Over the past month I already noticed that a few of them are not very active, yet I could not read 100% of all the posts (almost 2000 now). In addition, since this is  my first online course after all, I was worried that I intervene too much and do not allow all my students to take active part in the discussion. So to be honest, I was a little bit nervous before trying it out. So here is a snapshot from a real picture of the discussion from my class. I removed all the students’ names for this post, but the software allows you to have them displayed. As you can see, you cannot identify where my dot is (which is great news  – the world does not revolve around me). You ca also see that all the students participate in the discussion with only one of them being significantly less active (actually this person is catching up now). In addition, you can see that most of the dots (2/3 of them) have more or less the same size, except for the 6 dots on the outskirts of the graph. This means that this diagram shows me who are the students who are not as engaged in the discussion and now I can contact them personally. In addition, I will share this snapshot with my students, as I think it is important for them to see it. I think it is a very interesting tool for the teacher and for the students, especially for online classes and for large classes using course management systems. I hope you will also enjoy this tool!