My Take
TodaysMeet promotes communication and collaboration for all. Through using this backchannel, even my quietest and least participatory students were involved in the conversation. It allowed for students that need more wait time, the time they needed to formulate a response without feeling the "pressure". Everyone had a voice! Every student had opportunities to share and be heard. Students also were able to respond and interact with each other versus teacher talk time. Additionally, content can now be moderated to limit inappropriate or off task conversation and also affords the privacy needed within a school setting. Overall, TodaysMeet is a great tool for creating digital conversations within the classroom, and I look forward to using it again.
How I Use It
TodaysMeet can be used in a variety of ways to provide meaningful follow up and discussion with a group after small group reading, collaborative class discussions, student question space that allows others or teacher to answer, exit tickets, and so much more. Most recently in class, I have used it to engage participation and gage attention when watching a video at independent or group work. Many times when assigning a video for students to watching it is difficult to determine if they are actually paying attention and gaining information from the video. TodaysMeet provides a way for teachers to do this! For this students open the video content website and TodaysMeet on their Chromebooks and then use the tab resize extension in Google Chrome for the web browser to take up about 75% of the screen for the video and 25% for the backchannel (TodaysMeet). This enables students to talk and discuss what they are learning in the video, ask questions about content that confuses them, add their thoughts, and also allows the teacher to pose questions throughout as well. The timer feature also allowed for students to only access the "chat room" during the assignment period, which was beneficial. My students were a little overwhelmed at first, but once we walked through it they found it easy to use and asked when we would use it next after completing their task.