We had a debate yesterday in my iBT class (mostly 6th graders with two 5th graders) about a topic that comes up now and then on this blog: is downloading music without permission wrong? That question was the basis of our proposition. Often, when I have an uneven number of students, I participate in the debate myself, on one side or the other. This provides modelling of debate language for the students and they seem to find it entertaining. I don't think my performance as the last CON team speaker in this debate was particularly good, though.
Here is the debate.
I have been sending debate speech recordings to the students' parents, lately, too. This is proving rather popular. I think the parents like seeing how their kids are doing.