TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet is a chat platform for the use of teachers and learners.  It is a quick and easy way to have an ongoing dialogue within the classroom without requiring students to sign up for something.  The big benefit of TodaysMeet is the ability to encourage all learners to participate in the discussion and to be able to save the discussion transcript for later use by the teacher and the students.

As the creator's of TodaysMeet say, "TodaysMeet is the premier backchannel chat platform."  What this means is while you have an ongoing activity or presentation, the students would be participating in an ongoing discussion.  A great example of this is when presenting a new concept in class where the teacher really needs to be able to move through the whole lecture, a backchannel chat room could be open so that when students think of questions they may have, they could put them into the chat room.  The teacher then would be able to pull this up at the end of the lesson to address the questions.  

It is really easy to join as a teacher.  Simply go to TodaysMeet and sign up.

If you don't wish to create an account, that is fine, just click on the Ready? Get started now and create your room.

The only disadvantage to just creating a room for discussion is tracking it later on if you need to remember what the name of it was or need to access material from it.  By creating an account you always have a list of your rooms to come back to use.

Opening a room is easy.  Name it, how long do you want it open and do you want it to require the users to have accounts or is it just open.

Create a new room here.  Note the More Options drop down menu.

This allows you to set Who is allowed to see or participate in the room?

After creating the room, it will immediately open to the Chat Room.  The teacher puts in their nickname and begins the discussion by posting in the Message box.

Teacher's adds name under Nickname.

Begin the Chat.

Other applications in the classroom:

The teacher could pose questions during the lesson and add them into the chat room for the students to respond within the room to check for understanding.  Imagine the students working on a group assignment and having individual rooms created for each group to be able to share their thoughts when they are not in the classroom.  The teacher would still be part of the room so monitoring could occur but the students would continue to be able to work even from their own homes within the chatroom bouncing ideas off of each other.