This year I've been experimenting with different ways to use back-channel chats in my classroom. For the most part it's gone very well and my students have benefited from the experience. You can read about those good experiences here and here. Yesterday, I tried to do something new with a back-channel. What I tried did not work and I hope that those of you considering trying to use a back-channel in your classrooms can learn from my mistake.
Yesterday, I had a short (25 minute) video that showed to my students. For some reason I got the idea that I would award a bonus point (added to a quiz I recently gave) to the first student to correctly answer the questions I posted in the back-channel. In hindsight making chat a contest was a very bad idea because most of my students either posted guesses as quickly as they could or they tuned-out because they didn't think they could answer quickly enough. In the end, because of my mistake, my students didn't pay attention to the video as well as they would have otherwise. So while a back-channel can definitely improve the educational value of showing a video in class (case in point here), it must be done correctly.
Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Back-channeling During a Class Viewing of Glory
Try TodaysMeet for Back-channel Chat Without Distraction
Neat Chat - Quickly Create an Ad-free Chatroom
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A Classroom Back-channel Gone Wrong
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5 comments:
I tried TodaysMeet during a video a few weeks ago. This time, I used EtherPad and had groups of students collaborate on a summary. EtherPad has a chat window, so they could discuss changes to make, etc. When I polled each class afterward, they overwhelmingly preferred EtherPad. There might be times when I'd use TodaysMeet again, though.
Lisa,
That's interesting. Did the kids say why they preferred EtherPad? I might give that a try next time.
Richard
I also used EtherPad in our school. We actually used it to write to the president when he visited Norway suggesting ways he could spend the award money. I would love to try to have my students write with yours using TodaysMeet on a topic of interest for both classes. What do you think would that work?
Thanks for sharing what didn't work. That so often doesn't make its way out in the open. Hopefully other will learn for this experience. I have!
My kids liked Etherpad because they had a very concrete goal (creating an "encyclopedia article" based on the video content). They thought that the chat through TodaysMeet moved too quickly and was overly chaotic. Etherpad will be no more in a few weeks, though, so I'll be hunting for some other way to create collaborative documents.
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