Using Backchannels in the Classroom

A backchannel is a conversation that goes along with the primary lesson, discussion, or activity.  Some of you may already be using a similar tool to support your daily lessons, but for those of you that this is a new concept, read on!  Kahoot is one that most people are familiar with using, Socrative, and Padlet are other backchannel sites.  I will be talking about TodaysMeet.

Neither students nor teachers need to have an account to use the site.  To create a backchannel conversation, a teacher would hop on the TodaysMeet site and give their room a name, and then *share their room's URL with the class. Students can then add responses to the room throughout the lesson as they think of them.  You decide when the room closes down, so if you want to keep it open after school hours for homework, you have that option.

*Consider using the new Google Tone extension to share the URL.  You can find it in the Chrome Web Store.  Everyone needs to have the extension for it to work, but it will share any URL through an audio wave.  Watch this 30 second video to see what I mean:
Ditch That Textbook has posted 20 ways to use TodaysMeet or another backchannel in your classroom.

For the visual learners, a tutorial on TodaysMeet:


The benefits of using a backchannel in your classroom:

  1. Shy students are given a place to ask questions.
  2. You can gauge your students' interest in a topic and/or prior knowledge.
  3. Students who ask a lot of questions and normally dominate the conversation can ask as many questions as they want and you can choose when to answer them.
  4. You don't have to worry about running out of classroom time.  When the class period has ended, you can choose for the backchannel to remain open so students can continue to ask questions.
  5. You can gauge the effectiveness of your activity in real time and gather feedback from your students.



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