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This qualitative study investigates how young students expressed, explored and expanded their ideas of how they could contribute to sustainable development. We analyse a trajectory in a Norwegian 8th grade class, focusing on the students’ emerging understanding through microblogging and talk in individual, group and whole class activities. The material analysed are logs from a microblogging tool and transcribed video recordings from two lessons. We examined the trajectory as a whole to understand how the topic was treated, we sorted students’ microblogs thematically, and we used interaction analysis to investigate talk excerpts. The results show that the students initially tended to suggest everyday actions related to reducing consumption, and that through classroom interactions about a challenging idea their understanding broadened. The combination of microblogging activities and discussions facilitated the travelling of ideas between activities and participants, prompted the students to question, elaborate and reason, supported broad participation, and helped students create links between everyday actions and wider sustainability issues.

High-quality classroom dialogues improve students’ capacities to learn school subjects and help them develop more general skills such as collaboration and critical thinking. In this chapter, we take a sociocultural stance toward learning and cognition. “Gap-closing” is used as a key concept to understand and explain why and how teachers and students interact in order to advance students’ agency. To effectively enhance classroom dialogues, teachers need to use language in specific ways, which can be supported by digital tools like Talkwall. Talkwall is a web-based micro-blogging tool that enables students to send short text messages during classroom discussions with their tablets or mobile phones. Their contributions are then shared and represented visually; the developing ideas are connected in a digital representation that participants can continually refer to throughout the dialogue, keeping each idea present and available for the whole class. Talkwall is designed to support the movement of classroom dialogues between teacher-led, whole-class discussions and small, student-group discussions. The empirical illustration used in this chapter is based on an interaction analysis of how students and teachers use rap lyrics to learn literary methods and concepts.