Backchannelling in class...

...or simply chatting? What's the verdict? Have any readers tried this in class? In what context? With what degree of success?

I ask because I've just discovered TodaysMeet.  And I'd use it if I could, and try it in class as I always do with the new things I find. But I can't use TodaysMeet, because the Academy's ISP has blocked access to it, because it is a chatroom, and chatrooms, as we all know, are bad!

So I've just wasted precious hours communicating with our ISP (Virgin Media), and with the Local Authority employee who is supposed to represent educators to the ISP, trying to get them to understand that it is not dangerous to allow a class of 25 Year 7 students share an exclusive chatroom with their teacher in order to experiment with and trial the whole concept of backchannelling. I lost the argument. Conservative intransigence reigns supreme in the realms of the LA.

However, speaking with the network manager this week, it seems that we may soon see and end to such restrictive filtering, when we get our own filtering system which puts us entirely in charge of who can see what within the Academy. And then I shall use TodaysMeet.

TodaysMeet is simplicity itself. The instigator visits the website and creates the chatroom - gives it a name (which then forms part of its URL), and decides how long it shall remain live. He then contacts all who are to be members, and shares the URL with them. A Twitter hashtag can be added, too. 

All visit the chatroom at the agreed time, and...

...well, they chat! Or...


...they use the service for backchannelling, for holding their own background conversations about the lesson, the video, the whatever's going on in class at the time.  The whole conversation can be transcribed and used afterwards by the teacher to identify questions that need to be answered, issues which need clarifying, students who need extra support and so on.

 

A fabulous idea, and an excellent piece of software to realise it. Roll on the Academy filtering system!