Learning & Leading Through Technology

Dealing with Age Limits

The terms for the TodaysMeet website restrict children under the age of 13 from using the service. If not blocked on the school’s network, teachers can still have students in seventh grade and up backchannel. To accommodate students who were still 12 years old, we simply paired them with a 13-year-old classmate. The 12-year-old collaborated with the 13- year-old, who actually posted the comment to TodaysMeet.

We asked students to enter comments, questions, analysis, predictions, and text excerpts to support their points. What got them particularly engaged was that they could ask questions or communicate their insights without having to wait to be called on. We projected the backchannel stream through the teacher’s interactive whiteboard, so students could monitor their contributions and the posts of other students.

We were thrilled by the students’ involvement in the text. During one part of the activity, students posted their predictions about what motivated the characters in the story. Sure, some of the students offered crazy, offbeat commentary involving zombies and an impending apocalypse, but that was OK. We actually encouraged students to go with these ideas because it allowed us to refocus the discussion back to the text and required the students to provide evidence and reasoning to their classmates supporting their interpretations.

What really excited us was how
backchanneling gave many of the
shyer students the opportunity to
participate in a way that wasn’t in-
timidating. These students could
anonymously contribute, defend,
qualify, and argue without even rais-
ing their hands. We found that while
many initially contributed to the
backchannel quietly, they warmed up
enough to the discussion to vocalize
their opinions and analysis later in
the class period.

Tool Meets ISTE Standards

The ISTE Standards require students to be able to “use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.” The backchannel encouraged our students to do just that. And Herring and I felt that using personal technology to discuss their predictions and thoughts engaged them in a richer, more enthusiastic way. For the record, one of the more spirited contributors made a pretty compelling—and evidence-supported— case for zombies.

—Michael S. Mills, EdD, is an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas, where he teaches classroom management and assessment and devotes most of his time to integrating technology in the classroom.