This afternoon we used Today's Meet for the first time. This is a backchannel chat platform designed for classroom teachers and learners. A backchannel is often a conversation that goes on alongside an activity, presentation or discussion.
We used it to get all of our views on a couple of ideas we have been talking about recently in Room 14. These included things like allowing private messaging on USpace, our classroom responsibilities and the prospect of a Genius Hour type initiative.
A teacher can simply set up a chatroom through the Today's Meet website, set a timeframe for the chatroom to be live, and away you go. All the children need to do is follow the page link given to them by the teacher and enter their first name. From there, children are in a secure chatroom where they can write to each other about a given topic. This is similar to how many people use Twitter.
It was great to see how engaged we all were in this new way (for us) of sharing our ideas. We know that we have other means to perform similar tasks, as pointed out by Phoebe in the video below, but this website could really prove to be useful in many situations. It's exciting to add another tool to our Room 14 kit.
Another nice aspect of today was that half of us weren't even in the classroom! It was so hot that many of us with learner licences were sharing our ideas from outside.
The transcript of this first Meet will be printed and displayed on our foyer wall tomorrow if parents are interested in having a read.
I liked how it was a live screen but it was hard to read what other people write
ReplyDeleteI thought that phoebe had thoughtful ideas
ReplyDeleteWe talked about how we could use it with our learning some answers were more thoughtful then others! We think it could help us because when Mr K wants us to solve something he can do it and today's meet!
ReplyDeleteWe we're amazing in that video
ReplyDelete