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.
You can follow him on Twitter @AquiAmigo.
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