I’m always looking for ways to engage my students. We have been learning about the Canadian Shield in Social Studies. My student teacher has taken over the unit, but I had to suggest an activity to get the kids motivated and thinking. We backchanneled with our grade five class while they watched Survivorman.
Survivorman is a program where Les Stroud is dropped into a wilderness situation and has to survive for 7 days. I use it to teach geography is many contexts. It shows the land, Les is a fantastic wilderness photographer, and what resources are available. His arctic episode is great for my unit on the north, the swamp episode perfect for wetlands, and the Costa Rica episode is wonderful for Rainforests. He even has one where he is lost at sea that would tie into teaching about oceans. The list could go on…
The idea of backchanneling is one I’ve seen blogged about before, and I was very intrigued with how it might look with elementary aged students. The moment I showed them Today’s Meet they couldn’t wait to get started. I chose to use Today’s Meet as my backchannel tool because it is very simple, clean, and not distracting. The students focus on the message and the information being presented, not ads or flashing banners. It allows the students to enter a simple name and they are in the chat instantly. It also displays their name so I can easily track who posted what comment. Perfect!
I am going to have to try Today’s Meet. I was thinking of using the moodle chatroom but this looks like it would work much better. Thanks for sharing.
Today’sMeet is definitely a great backchannel, it’s just a pity it doesn’t like the Swedish funny characters with dots on top
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So cool! This kind of stuff gets me all fired up. Deep learning going on . . .