Welcome to
1. What is it? What does it do?
TodaysMeet is a tool, which can be used to maintain students' focus on the subject of the teacher's lecture. The tool allows students to continually post comments, questions and answers on the screen, while the teacher undergoes a topic. You can create a room in TodaysMeet without creating a user account, and need only give the students access to the room by sharing a url with them.
2. Why is this tool relevant to language teaching?
Within the monological form of teaching, it is natural to use TodaysMeet as a common reflection- and questions / answers platform, displayed on the projector / interactive whiteboard. Students can continually ask questions aimed at the teacher and each other about the content of what is presented, and they may have solved some of the doubts, that slows their understanding of the presented subject.
The most important thing is that all the ideas students got can gather together, which can be seen as a collaboration work in an ELT/ICT class. In this way, it is useful when teachers plan to distribute some pair work or group discussion.
3. How to use it?
Easy to learn. Just follow this video:
The teacher gets an insight into, whether his/her presentation is well adapted to the students, and the whispering that normally takes place at the back of the class, is channeled into class using TodaysMeet, and may contribute to the onging evaluation and adapation of teaching.
Following the teacher's presentation, one can examine the contents of TodaysMeet-room, and ensure that everyone gets their questions answered.
4. What are the limitations of using this technology?
- It needs a high support from the teaching institution for computers or other Internet-based facilities, eg. iPad.
- The responses are limited to 140 words or less so there is no development to the points given.
- It minimized the face-to-face communication between teacher and students, and also student-student interaction, which may hinder the development of students' communicative competence.
Hi Cynthia,
ReplyDeleteAs you say, a whole class member can stimulate each other by individual short responses. Brainstorming and collaboration are benefits of this application.
Furthermore, I think that if teachers use this tool as our teacher, Russell did it in our ICT classroom, there would be a lot of interactions and face-to-face communications.
It is! I think it is very useful in our future teacher practices!
DeleteAgree! It will be not that good / supportive if it minimizes teacher-learner / learner-learner interaction. However, I personally still consider it a great tool for brainstorming and classroom discussion. :)
ReplyDeleteYes! But I found it will take some time for teachers to give comments or evaluate students' ideas, so it becomes a challenge for teachers to manage time and balance students' reaction.
Delete