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they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether the blogs posted by their fellow students  are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down.   If not, any student who wishes can revise. If you revise, you get the credit.  End of story.  Or, if you are too busy and want to skip it, no problem.  It just means you'll have fewer ticks on the chart and will probably get the lower grade.  No whining.  It's clearcut and everyone knows the system from day one.  (btw, every study of peer review among students shows that students perform at a higher level, and with more care, when they know they are being evaluated by their peers than when they know only the teacher and the TA will be grading). 

Set up a backchannelOne of my favourite tools to use during presentations is Today’sMeet http://todaysmeet.com/ . It’s a great tool for setting up backchannels. A backchannel is basically what your students create when they talk among themselves or text each other during your lesson.The advantage of setting one of these up to allow your audience to do this is that you can capture and share what your audience is saying while they are listening to you and enable them to collaborate and share with each other what they know about the topic and links to any relevant resources.It can also help them to type in questions as they think of them rather than waiting for you to ask at the end, and for me it’s a great way to pass out URLs to interesting websites to give the audience some hands on participation during the presentation.It’s also a good way of getting the audience to brainstorm and do tasks together, just ask a few questions and get them to type in answers, and they’ll appear in the backchannel window for everyone to see.