Easy Interaction in Primary Grades using Today’s Meet!

Today’s Meet is a great, mostly free site that allows you to create a space for students to comment, reflect and contribute to a class discussion.  It allows teachers in a primary classroom to have a digital commentary going that is dynamic and engaging for students.

As a primary school teacher, creating logins and passwords can be fraught as you manage the problems of missing passwords and parent permissions. However, Today’s Meet allows students to access the site with merely a username which they make up at the time and a special code that the teacher creates.  Creating a login for a teacher is simple with a sign up being a short process that then allows you to create ‘rooms’ for your students to log into.  Each room can be given a different name and only opens for a set period of time which is decided by you, at the time of opening.

In my classroom experience, I have used Today’s Meet for students aged 9 to 12 in a variety of ways.  I have used it as a form of backchannel discussion while students have watched a video clip in class.  They posted questions that occurred to them while they were watching that we then looked over and discussed.  I’ve used it as a form of formative and summative assessment as you can save the ‘thread’ or ‘chat’ for use at a later time.  I’ve asked students to find a sentence in their own reading books and convert the tense from present to past tense or vice versa. You can also use it to create a space to learn about how to interact in forums or chat discussions as part of your cybersafety lessons.

In fact, it turns the whole ‘cybersafety’ discussion and learning into a real-life situation as students inevitably realised that they don’t have to type in their names to log into the room and suddenly it’s filled with ‘IronMan10’ and ‘PrincessSparkle11<3’.  Students gain an insight into exactly how easy it is to pretend to be something you’re not.  I combat this generally in class by giving a thorough introduction when I begin using Today’s Meet about online spaces, identities and understanding the concept of ‘assume whatever you post is permanent’ and most students understand and play by the rules, using the online space for the purpose that you, the teacher, has directed. When it comes to persistent ‘offenders’, I tend to delete comments from those students who have not signed in with their first name which is a facility allowed only to the room’s creator i.e. the teacher.  After seeing their hard work and typing being deleted two or three times, they tend to log out and log back in with their first name.

I’ve used the space to discuss what is appropriate and inappropriate language and topics for spaces such as these, and even in one instance when a group of girls were using the space to chat during school time about the responsibility and trust that we place in them to do the right thing and act in certain ways whether in person or online. In regards to the online safety of the site, some have said that it’s too easy for strangers to enter group rooms due to the lack of a sign up procedure. However it is my belief that a randomly generated code and your chosen room name means that it would be quite difficult to get into unless someone had those very specific details.

I find Today’s Meet a valuable resource that is easy to use and navigate. Its set up is straight forward and its functionality and simplicity make it easy to adapt to whatever you need it to be. Give it a go and be rewarded with a class of shining eyes, who are engaged, learning from one another and using technology as a tool to collaborate and process their understanding.