Today's Meet
Post date: Feb 18, 2013 3:43:13 PM
Backchannelling is everything going on in the room that is not coming from the teacher. A backchannel allows students to ask each other questions, pass notes, and provides everyone in the room with immediate feedback. Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you.
Todaysmeet.com provides a quick and easy way to set up a chat room on the fly. Just go to the website and create a room. You have the option to make the room active for as little as 2 hours or as long as one year. Today's Meet allows for active "silent" learning to occur throughout an otherwise typical lesson.
Quite a few teachers at WMS have used Today's Meet as their tool of choice during classroom fishbowl discussions. A fishbowl discussion involves a small group of students in the center of the room (i.e. the fishbowl) who are generating and responding to questions orally. Students on the outside of the bowl enter their questions, responses, and insight using Todaysmeet.com as the backchannel. The benefit of this process would be the fact that the entire class is participating in an ongoing discussion - not just those students chosen to participate in the fishbowl.
- I found this Google doc on Twitter which explains how to use Today's Meet for video conversations
- This is a good article that illustrates the process of setting up a classroom fishbowl activity.
