Two weeks ago I wrote a post about my students using TodaysMeet for back-channeling while we discussed a slideshow that I had created for the class. This week, as I shared earlier on Twitter, I tried using TodaysMeet for a back-channel while my students watched the film Glory. It worked great!
In my school all of the students have ASUS Eee
Overall, in the last three weeks, having a back-channel forum for my students to ask questions and make comments has worked very well. I'm seeing more contributions from students who don't typically like to talk in class and I'm still getting the contributions from the extroverts in the room.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Back-channeling During a Class Viewing of Glory
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4 comments:
Thanks for sharing this; sounds like a brilliant lesson!
Haven't tried back-channeling in class myself yet, though I have used text messaging as part of groupwork activities. Like you, I found that the quieter students tended to participate more in online conversations than they did in classroom discussions.
Will be checking TodaysMeet out.
Great idea. I am glad it worked well.
Love your blog. Never commented before on it.
I am a tutor and don't even have a teacher computer at school. Guess I can go to the computer lab or library but that's not where I usually work with students. I'm in K-5 elementary anyway, so we probably wouldn't back channel yet.
Keep up the good work! Thanks for all the great resources.
Thanks so much for sharing this, Richard! I'm eager to give TodaysMeet a try. My college class' experiences with EtherPad were very positive last week, but since it is going away I want to explore other options. Tony Vincent pointed me to iEtherPad as a site which is not going to shut down in March... How do you compare the functionality and experience of using TodaysMeet versus EtherPad with students in a backchannel?
Wesley,
Admittedly, I have not tried to use EtherPad with my high school students so I can't speak to how it works in that setting. For my needs, the shining feature of TodaysMeet is that students are not required to make accounts in order to use it. I can set up a room in seconds and have the kids jump into conversation. In fact, during a class last week one of my students set up a room on her own for brainstorming with the members of her work group.
Richard
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