Facilitating students’ individual and collective knowledge construction through microblogs

• We found different pathways of engagement across activities for high and low increase students.
• Despite differences in participation, we found that the technology-supported whole class discussion encouraged learning for all students.
• Sharing and displaying microblogs on a projection screen encouraged elaborations on the subject content.
• The teachers activate participation in the technology-supported whole class discussion was central for how the students participated.

This paper reports on a microblog intervention that purports to prepare students to engage in rich, whole-class discussions. In this study, students (n = 25) used microblogs to summarise text information, which was then shared on tablets and a big projection screen in the classroom. We analysed individual preparations, participation in teacher-led whole-class discussion, and performance on a research-developed intervention. The context for the study was a history class exploring the topic of democratic development and the role of ideologies in Europe prior to the First World War. We employed descriptive quantitative analysis to understand students’ outcomes, and contrastive case analysis to trace four representative students’ trajectories of participation across classroom activities. Students’ engagement varied, and the differences transcended the activities in which they took part. Even though some of the students did not use the microblogs, the technology-supported whole-class discussion encouraged learning for even reluctant bloggers. We saw these gains in reference to students’ ongoing interpretations shared through microblogs during the whole-class discussion.