Using TodaysMeet.com in the Classroom

I've used TodaysMeet. For many reasons.

Mostly to talk to others in the room during administrative district days. You know...when you are thoroughly bored (if you're my administrator, not you) and need something to do? I love TodaysMeet as back channel at great professional development when I don't understand a concept. It didn't even occur to me to use it with my students until I read Catlin Tucker's website suggestion of using TodaysMeet in the classroom.

What is TodaysMeet? If you go to TodaysMeet.com, you will be prompted to name the room and join. Whatever name you named the room will become the url for others to join ex: todaysmeet.com/1984Period3. You can also set the length of time the feed will be open AND get an archive of the conversation. Then you just have your students join and begin "tweeting" answers to whatever questions you're asking.

For Instance...

Yesterday my students were comparing 1984's methods of patriotism to that of our school's and the U.S.A. I would ask them to give examples of how our school promotes spirit and their responses went into a feed on everyone's device and I was projecting it on the screen. It was a nice way to change up a class discussion. It got playful too. My students began using hashtags with responses which is taking the concept of digital literacy to a completely new level.

Cautions...

Of course, the maturity of your students plays into what you'll do with this.

• For me it is classes- I'll let my 1st and 3rd period classes play but my 5th period is way too sketchy.Use your "authoritative voice" when you tell them that the first person to use an alias as his/her name or put something inappropriate up will shut it down for the rest of the class and we won't do it again.
• Set the time to expire in 2 hours so they can't come back to it later when you're not moderating
• Set a new page url for each period and don't tell the other periods what the urls were, this way your previous classes can't edustalk and "help" in later periods.