Group items tagged

This blog describes a first experience with using a backchannel to help out students while they were watching a history film in class. Applicable across the curriculum and for ESOL.

"With the advance of web 2.0 technologies, there emerged a wide range of educational tools that we can use with our students in and outside the classroom.Collaborative web tools is one example. Using such websites, teachers will be able to help in holding online and real-time discussions with their students, help them in their projects and assignments, guide their learning, do backchanneling, and synchronously moderate discussion threads and many more." The focus here is on tools for collaboration. Many are new and interesting, such as virtual whiteboards, searchteam to do online searches together, browse websites together, create online projects collaboratively, create your own chatroom, etc.. Some of these will be gone quickly, but they all appear quite useful. About 30 in the list.

This Etherpad clone allows you to set up a live public text chat on the fly. Enter your name and then invite users to share your pad. Use it as a backchannel during a flipped classroom, or with your lecture or conference presentation on land to receive questions from the audience.

Create a text chat on the fly. Set up a public pad without sign-up, then invite others to join you. Use it for backchanneling questions during a lecture or meeting. Or embed a Google Hangout to allow more than 10 users to follow the audio talk.

This chat room tool might be useful for your classes, or as a backchannel if several teachers are working on a presentation together. The interface can be mounted on your own website, ensuring that students don't wander off. You can easily save a transcript of the chat, and it lets students join from home or other classrooms. T/H to H. Dilatush who let us in EVO know about it.

This blog describes some tools for live conference speakers to help make presentations more interactive: "here are a few tools that, thanks to the increasing availability of wireless connectivity at conference centres these days, might help to turn your passive listeners into a bunch of multitasking audience collaborators." These tools include TodaysMeet, for backchannel communications, live polling at Urtak, and Sync.in which will allow collaborative note-taking. Using all these tools will make a live presentation seem much more like an audio-video conference in WiZiQ or Elluminate.