Backchannel

I tried a couple of things for back channel use in class. Some groups are doing review and I thought it might be useful for students to be able to post queries and help each other work out answers to problems. I tried using todaysmeet first. This didn’t work as the thread would get very untidy very rapidly. If someone asked a question, the answer would not be associated with it. It also took too much policing as it wasn’t clearly useful.

I thought wallwisher might help with the issue of associating questions with answers. Turns out it functioned so slowly with the group we simply abandoned this one.

Basically, I think this is an idea that doesn’t fit my classroom very well – I would rather have people just talk to each other. The idea that the conversation could carry on beyond the room would only work if it involved something like facebook pages.

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todays meet

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.