Free Webinar - A Teacher's Guide to Backchannels and Informal Assessments

Earlier this year I created and published A Teacher's Guide to Backchannels and Informal Assessment . That free guide explains what a ba...

Video - How to Create a Padlet Wall for Your Classroom

Earlier this week I published an updated version of my guide to using backchannels and informal assessment tools in your classroom . In that...

Three Good Ways to Use TodaysMeet in Your Classroom

TodaysMeet.com  is a completely free service for hosting backchannel discussions. Over the years I’ve used it in a ...

Cryptocat - Create Encrypted Backchannels

Cryptocat is an open source project that allows users to create private encrypted chat rooms. Cryptocat can be installed in Firefox, Chrome...

Vizaroo - Collect Student Feedback in Diagrams

Vizaroo is a new service that reminds me a bit of Socrative and Infuse Learning . The idea behind Vizaroo is to use the web to collect ins...

12 Tools for Quickly Gathering Informal Feedback from Students

This morning I'm again facilitating a workshop with Greg Kulowiec . At the start of the session we introduced three tools for quickly ga...

Live Blogging the Wizard of Oz

Movies are wonderful resources in education, but they are usually associated with passive learning. To keep students (grades 9-12) active ...

Soap Box - A Backchanneling Tool for Tablets, Phones, and Laptops

Soap Box is a new service that enables teachers to gather instant feedback from students through their cell phones, tablets, or laptops. So...

Reel App - Share Your Slides and Get Feedback Online

Reel App provides a nice service for sharing your PPT, PDF, and image files with the world. A lot of other services do the same. What Reel ...

Simple Meet Me - A Simple Way to Chat Online

Simple Meet Me is a free service for quickly creating an online chat room with anyone you like. To use the service just go to SimpleMeet.Me...

Watch2gether - Watch Videos and Discuss Them at the Same Time

Watch2gether is a neat site through which you can watch YouTube videos and host text chats about them at the same time. It is really quite ...

Backchannels in the Classroom

These are the slides from my workshop about backchannels that I ran this afternoon in Bath, Maine. Earlier this evening I gave a presentatio...

Mister Thread - Password Protected Backchannels

For more than a year now I've been sharing Todays Meet with anyone interested in using backchannel forums in their classrooms. I like T...

Backchan.nl - A Backchannel With Voting Features

Backchan.nl is an open-source backchannel tool developed at the MIT Media Lab. Using Backchan.nl you can create an online forum through w...

Shout Reel - Create Public or Private Chat Communities

Shout Reel is a free service that allows you to create a private or public chat area or message system. When you create a Shout Reel accou...

Chatterous - Create Private or Public Chat Rooms

Chatterous is a free platform for creating your own private or public chat rooms. Many other services also allow you to create your chat r...

Hotseat - Backchannel Platform Coming to a Classroom Near You

Some smart IT folks at Purdue University are developing a new platform for hosting classroom backchannel discussions. The new platform is c...

Two Examples of Backchannels in Elementary School

Yesterday, during my Reform Symposium presentation on the use of backchannels in the classroom there were some questions about the appropri...

HootCourse - A Classroom Application for Twitter

Last week Beth Still recommended to me that I check out HootCourse . Beth teaches online courses for high school students so I knew that if...