Today's Meet

On the afternoon of March 14th I attended an EdTech session entitled “High Tech History”  conducted by Aaron Dodge a middle school social studies teacher, and Jennifer Richardson an ITRT, both of Charles City. As it turns out, the websites are ones which Aaron has used in his history class, but, aren't at all specific to history.

I don’t have a lot of notes from the session, but, here are some brief remarks on some of the websites they mentioned.

First on the list is Today’s Meet, which was discribed as similar to Twitter. Today’s meet is an elegantly simple site…with some drawbacks. It is premised on the supposition that there is backchannel discussion” going on in your classroom. A backchannel discussion is “everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter”—things like; “What are your doing after school tonight?” Here is a quote from their website:

“The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give you the most immediate feedback you'll ever get.
Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.
Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.”

You simply go to the site, create a “room” and decide how long you want it to be active—from a couple of hours to a year. Once the room is created, you have a short URL which anyone can go to and contribute to the discussion. If someone wants to contribute to the discussion, they type in their name and a message (of 140 characters or less), and click on “say” The message then appears on the screen of anyone else who is at that website. The obvious drawback is that the teacher cannot moderate the discussion. In fact, the creator of the class room is at the same level as everyone else, they can contribute messages, but so can anyone. Any student could make up a bogus name and enter a distracting, disruptive, or obscene remark.

The teacher can switch to a “projector” mode showing only the discussion …or on “transcript” and get a printable copy of the discussion.

The next website they mentioned was Edmodo.com. After writing the draft for the text above, I spent a couple of hours investigating Edmodo. I’m really excited about Edmodo and want to give it its own posting, so I’ll save that for just a bit.

The ITRTs of ACPS were already well aware of a couple of additional
sites mentioned in the session:

GoAnimate—for making animated videos. We’ll have to do some future blogs on all the sites similar to this one.

Blabberize--for producing talking, embeddable avatars from photos. That is, taking a photo of someone’s face, uploading it, and making the mouth move up and down as a voice (yours or a digitally produced one) speaks from a script you’ve written.

Vocaroo--"The premier voice recording service"  At this site, in theory, you can click and record a message (our firewall seems to prevent this from working at school) or upload a message you recorded on your laptop recorder (this worked).  A link is then generated which displays a media player that will play back the recording.  Embed code is also produced allowing  you to post the player in a webpage.  There are also sharing options tailored to twitter, facebook, wordpress, etc.

That’s it for this entry, but, I promise, it won’t be long before I create another post dealing with Edmodo.