Introduction
TodaysMeet is one of the easiest online (especially back-channel) discussion & collaboration tools that can be applied to lectures and English lessons. Teachers can easily create an online chat room and invite all students come in by sharing with them a link normally "http://todaysmeet.com/'room name'". Simply speaking, it affords a new way of classroom discussion. Although many blogs and websites have focused on and praised its versatility, I would like to start from my critical concerns about such tools and further talk about my ideas about its implementation in English language teaching drawing on them. (a video demo of my work will be shown later on)
Rationale - Some concern and problems about using TodaysMeet
When it comes to the discussion or collaboration tools, the first word coming to my mind is 'de-centralisation'(quite a popular word in recent years), like the digital communication from web 1.0 to web 2.0 weakening the voice of authority by multiple voices. This trend is as well appearing in the field of education featuring the changing roles of teachers, as King (1993) put it, 'from sage on the stage, to the guide on the side'. It is quite meaningful to make it a starting point in this essay that introduces TodaysMeet, as the implementations of such discussion and collaboration tools are providing both affordances and challenges to teachers.
Drawing on the eleven affordances of technology summarised by Conole and Dyke (2004: 113-124), I shall briefly focus on two affordances that TodaysMeet and similar tools provide - accessibility and reflection, and talk about my practical concern in its implementations.
Accessibility
TodaysMeet undoubtedly provides students opportunities to carry out backchannel discussions in real time and make their voice heard, in other words, it means it offers the teacher super-easy access to huge amount of real-time information from students within a very short period of time (within minutes). The good here is apparently the high efficiency of interaction and information collection, provided by the affordance of accessibility. However, the big challenge it brings is that information overload and even the quality (unrelated posts by some students) need teachers to be able to skilfully select information swiftly and make explanation and elaboration.
Reflection
Asynchronous technologies like TodaysMeet (there are better examples than TodaysMeet, such as Tricider) provide the affordance of reflection, allowing students to be able to engage in a discussion for a longer time than only face-to-face discussion in class (many tools allow chat rooms opened for months, teachers can also print out the real time discussions for students to review or for themselves to talk further in next sessions). This affordance is remarkable and I will talk about this deeper when introducing other tools.
My work and ideas of implementation
1. In English language teaching classroom, TodaysMeet can be efficiently and easily handled to carry out form-focused practice. For example, in the exercise of making sentences based on specific grammar points or similar topics, have students make their sentences in the chat room, the teacher will be able to correct the sentences together with all students and all students will be able to see and learn from each others from either good expressions or error corrections. Following link is one of my example in which I pretend to be different students (Jack, Jane, John, Bowen, Mary) making up sentences by using past participles as adjectives in a sentence to describe problems.
Check it out: http://screencast.com/t/niud2RxY0u
2. Another safe but very useful application is when having students watching an English video, a film for example, letting them post their instant ideas of questions on TodaysMeet, the teacher can stop at various intervals if necessary to solve these questions.
3. Many brainstorming activities can be carried out on TodaysMeet, such as having students come up with their favourite fruit. As mentioned before, the amount of the information capable of dealing with is a problem such as in a big class with 50 students. Having students post short sentences and words like fruit names may be easier to handle and also useful for them since here the affordance is actually reflection since students can still review these answers outside the class.
Using discussion tools like TodaysMeet to carry out activities the teacher can handle is a practical problem, not only depending on the types of activities chosen but also the teacher's capacity to select, evaluate and categorise information from student interaction and handle the contingency in class which may need a long time to practice.
TodaysMeet website: https://todaysmeet.com/
Russell Stannard's training video:
References
Conole, G. & Dyke, M. (2004). What are the affordances of information and communication
technologies? ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology, 12, 113-124.
No comments:
Post a Comment