Todays Meet is specially designed for teachers to supervise ‘backchannel’ of the class while presenting the lessons, whose idea came from Twitter. The teacher simply create a room on the website and the class join the room via its URL and begin talking. It looks like MSN group chatting but in fact it’s different.
Firstly, it is much more convenient – no client and no account/password to log on. Secondly, students can make/ask anonymous comments/questions who might worry about doing so in front of the whole class. To the teacher, it provides a new and quick way to make formal assessment of students’ knowledge and adjust the lesson to their needs in realtime. Thus, both students’ participation and teaching efficiency can be improved.
But the condition is that the classroom is equipped with the Internet devices such as computers, laptop, IPAD for every student. Besides, some students, particularly the junior and middle years with poorer self-control, might easily get distracted and misuse the application by typing irrelevant things on it.
I love this tool! Have used it many times with teachers. Teachers are usually worried about students misusing the tool - like you said, typing relevant things into it - but my advice there is to say at the start that students can play around with it and type whatever they like (with the exception of swear words and bullying of course!) and get 'the sillies' out. Give them the chance to do that, then they are usually ok. And for students in lower and middle years it is not often an issue of self-control, but rather an issue of things in class not being very engaging for them. Just a thought :-)
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