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School Library Tech Camp - Thing 12 : Backchannel Sharing

Introduction

For lack of a better broad category, I'm using the popular term 'backchannel' to describe these tools. These are all tools that can be easily used to share questions, comments, ideas, suggestions, notes, brainstorming, etc. in a group setting. They can be used before, during and/or after a class, workshop or session.

Uses in School

Get more questions from the students, shy students less intimidated.
More sharing of expertise and ideas.
Great way to take notes as a group. Ask students to share key points during class sessions.
Brainstorm! Use them to share ideas and record thoughts about a project.
Surveys: Find out what students know before and what they learned after.

Activity

By now you'll all have posted a note or two to the class WallWisher wall. So try something new from this list of suggested activities.

Post something to the class TodaysMeet livestream.
Set up your own WallWisher wall or TodaysMeet room.
Post a note or question in this Google Moderator session.
Text a message to my Wiffiti board: Text @wif33420 + your message to 87884

Selected Backchannel Tools

Some Tools:

Twitter - Obviously twitter is one of the most popular tools for sharing quick comments & questions with many other people. Participants can add a "hashtag" to their comments to help others zero in on just the comments that are relevant to the topic at hand. For example, we could make up the hashtag #slstraining to identify tweets about these sessions. Twitter can get a bit distracting though with so many other off-topic tweets flying by! And many schools block twitter. We've already covered Twitter in much more detail in an earlier segment.

Wallwisher - This is a dead-simple tool for gathering comments from a group. You don't need an account to set up a page and users can add comments without any sort of account. Go ahead and test it out by leaving a note on the wall for today's class. For more WallWisher ideas, check out:

105 Classroom Ideas for WallWisher
Interesting Ways to Use WallWisher in a Classroom
Haiti Earthquake assignment (5th grad) - blog post discussing the assignment

TodaysMeet - This is more like twitter, with its stream of questions and comments flowing by, but the stream is private. Setting up a 'room' is free and doesn't require an account. Participants can leave notes and comments without having an account. These rooms aren't public, so others aren't likely to stumble into your conversation. It might be fun to write a collaborative story with this tool.

Google Moderator - A bit more feature-full than WallWisher and TodaysMeet, but a bit more complicated to set up and use. Allows participants to post a question or a note. The owner of the Moderator session can respond directly to each question. Participants can also vote on questions to show whether they agree or disagree. For more information, check out this ALA Learning blog post by Buffy Hamilton: Google Moderator: Ask, Share, Respond & Learn