http://todaysmeet.com/ gives a real quick display of comments from all the class and can be entertaining. It is very easy to set up and join and works smoothly.
There is a problem that it can easily get put of hand and get pretty distracting. It works fine if it has a specific purpose, but you can’t switch it off – it needs some ground rules like:
Use your name – nothing anonymous
Stay on task – this is a hard one as it would be really easy for people to set up their own backchannel and not use this one so it ends up being a policing thing
Slight issues are that there is a short lag, so competing doesn’t work, and that an archive of valuable info doesn’t come easily from this.
Possible uses would be ; quickfire questions and immediate responses (not anonymous though?), chance for students to ask questions (though why wouldn’t they just put there hand up?), …
All in all this seems like a neat app but not a good classroom fit for me.
Moving Forward 