"I know there's a way to backchannel in here... how do we do that?" asked my terrific techie friend who was diligently trying to find a way to backchannel in a Google Presentation during a Google Docs session we were attending at Google Days. "What in the world is backchanneling?" I answered with a puzzled look. I watched her play with the chat icon. This friend of mine will hyper focus and NOT give up until she finds a solution. LOVE her! Anywho, I sensed she wasn't going to be able to explain backchanneling until she figured this google thing out ... so I added it to my stickynote of Things to Learn About and continued listening to the presenter. Today is the day I dedicated to backchanneling. After watching a webinar by Richard Byrne and visiting his blog, I give you my summarizing analysis of what I understand backchanneling to be. Actually, it wasn't long into the webinar that I realized I already knew what this concept was but the term "backchanneling" was foreign. Backchanneling, in the simplist description I can give, is the new version of passing notes in class. It's a chat room. It gives students a chance to collaborate about concepts in real time. It has many classroom advantages, there are an assortment of tools you can use to do this, and it can be implemented at any grade level- with established ground rules.
Advantages:
- Engages students
- Gives shy students who are hesitant to raise their hand a voice
- Don't have to wait for students to raise their hands- immediate feedback
- Limits interruptions
- Gives you a record of conversations
- Documents student thinking
- Students can ask and answer questions in real time
- Students can continue to respond after class
- Students won't have to lower hand because someone else took their answer
- While showing movies, students can ask questions real time and teacher can answer without stopping the movie for those kids who don't need to slow down.
Problems that Can Occur:
- Students need to remain on topic
- Students need to demonstrate appropriate use
- Notes are public so students NEED to be managed
- It can be hard to keep up with the question- a moderator can be assigned or you'll need to find a way to moderate yourself.
How to Reduce Problems:
- teach appropriate use
- establish ground rules (below)
- assign a moderator
- stop the chat when students are off task and remind them of the rules.
Management and Ground Rules that Need to Be Established
- Teach students to use the chatroom for appropriate use- not personal
- Give them free time to learn the tool
- Give them time to practice keyboarding
- Tell them they'll have to multitask- read, listen, and write
- Discuss when it is appropriate to talk and when to turn voices off and listen (voices off when teacher is talking) Read and communicate via chat
- Teach them how read ongoing lines of chat
- Teach students how to summarize and write thoughts
- Make backchanneling relevant to the lesson
- Teach timing of comments- clarify not to comment on something that happened 5 minutes ago
- Assign aliases or have students choose aliases then keep the aliases on your desk. This helps students who are too shy to answer questions and every students voice can be equally hear throughout the room
- Don't turn the lesson into a scavenger hunt or race- let them take time to think and answer appropriately
- Promote independent thinking
Backchanneling gets more kids involved and actively engaged
as long as they are doing what they are supposed to.
Ways to Use It:
During Movies
- Ask questions- how many watched the film? and how many enjoyed it?
- Answer questions- students ask questions/ you answer them during film
- Add details- relate it to the curriculum without stopping the movie
- Make clarifications- help kids follow along- no need to stop the film to explain what's going on. Students can keep watching while students that are lost can get help catching up.
Guest Speakers
- We prepare our kids with pre-questions and want them to present themselves as polite and intelligent but the problem is that they haven't met this person yet so when the speaker comes they may have a whole new set of questions or ideas to ask about
- With backchanneling, they can ask questions while the speaker is there then the students, moderator, or teacher can can read them aloud to the speaker
- creating and researching. Example: science labs- students can share hypotheses, variables, data, and information
- classroom brainstorming
- pretest discussions
- open ended questions
- polling
- classroom ideas
- summarizing and synthesizing
- evaluating
- vocabulary or spelling checks
- skype calls
Other Things to Think About:
- How often should students backchannel? Once or twice a week
- How do you start a session? Start by asking a background question to determine where to start with lesson then delve into deeper questions.
- Can students still raise hands to ask and answer questions? Yes- don't ignore hand raising
Tools to Check Out:
Edmodo (free, private, protected- share image, docs, movies- discussion board)
Elluminate (need a school license- view video)
Todays Meet (easy- can create an expiration date)
Micromobs (quickly set up a room and share with a url)
Chatterous (can use cell phones)
Hoot Course (Combines twitter and facebook- students can sign in with fb account)
More Resources:
Whoot! Go girl! You are always a learner!
ReplyDeleteLet's call it a "growth" mindset! :0)
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