Managing the digital classroom - Using a backchannel

In my first post in this series - Getting students' attention - I mentioned the use of backchannels. This post should give you more information about the use of backchannels within the classroom.

If you are working in a classroom where your students have internet connected devices, either through wifi or their mobile phone, using a backchannel can have a transformative impact on the way you can use technology with your students.

“Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel

Most backchannels are text based and many-to-many, meaning that anyone can type in a message and it is seen by everyone who has access to the chatroom.



Back channels are particularly useful if you are working in a face to face environment where all or pairs/groups of students are working at a computer or if you are delivering live online classes using some form or web conferencing or webinar platform.

Backchannels help to solve a number of common classroom problems

Distraction

• I often describe a backchannel as the communication that happens between your students in the classroom every time to turn your back on them. The advantage of using a backchannel tool is that you can capture the intercommunication, be part of it and make it a constructive rather than a distracting part of the class.

Democratisation of learning

• Backchannels democratise the classroom or lecture room, at least for periods of time, and enable everyone to contribute what they know about the point or topic being discussed.

Giving students links to online resources

• If you want students to investigate a website, do an online task, watch a video or complete a digital worksheet, you simply use the back channel, paste in the link and they can access the materials simply by clicking the link and opening it in a new tab. This saves a lot of time and gets students directly to the sites you want them to access rather than leaving them struggling to write down long URLs and type them into the browser address bar.

Getting all students to respond to questions

• You can type in questions and get students to respond through the backchannel. Using this method all students are able to participate and respond to questions rather than the first one to put up their hand. This also gives less outspoken students the opportunity to respond.

Setting and reinforcing clear task

• When you set tasks for students to do you can back them up by also typing your instructions into the backchannel. This gives them something to refer back to and also helps to reinforce your verbal instructions. This can reduce wasted time going round the class helping weaker students get on task.

Brainstorming

• You can get students brainstorming ideas, suggestions, vocabulary, opinions or anything else through the back channel. This way everyone's contribution can be collected, shared and acknowledged.

Enabling students to share knowledge

• Students get share what they know about any topic or ask a question at any point during lesson, even when you are presenting, without disrupting the flow of the class.

Socialisation with students

• Students can socialise and you can socialise with students within the back channel. Just spending a few minutes at the start of the lesson asking questions and finding out what students are up to can really help to engage with your students.

Developing written fluency

• Interacting with students in a chatroom also gives students an opportunity to develop their written fluency through genuine communication.

Saving notes from the class

• The script from a backchannel can be saved and downloaded, so this is a great form of collaborative note taking. At the end of the class each student can edit their own version of the text to ensure they keep the parts that they feel are relevant.

Some problems with back channels

Safety

• As always we should take our students' online safety very seriously  when using any form of computer mediated communication that allows students or others to communicate with our students.  Some back channel tools require registration and this adds a greater element of security to the platform as users are more traceable, though student registration can add an extra layer of time management and friction to the setup process.
• If you decide to use a back channel that doesn't require registration then it's better to make sure you create a new one each lesson and only leave it live for only a short time.

Behaviour

• When you first start to use a back channel you may have some initial behaviour problems, especially with younger less mature students. Try to stay level headed when you deal with this. As the use of the back channel becomes more common place your students will get used to using it in a more responsible way, especially if they realise their comments can be traced back to them.

Class size

• If you have really large classes and lots of students are contributing comments it may get hard to keep up with all the interaction. Having a more complex backchannel tool like Backchannel Chat can help you to manage this more effectively.

Chaos

• Reading back through the text from a back channel can seem like reading through chaos to someone who wasn’t there at the time. Backchannel records will need to be edited to be useful, but  this is a good review activity for students.

Backchannel tools

Here are a number of tools you can use to create a backchannel in your classroom.
  
TodaysMeet: https://todaysmeet.com/
TodaysMeet is one of the simplest and easiest to use tools, and also one that’s free and very reliable. It doesn’t require registration by you or the students so it’s really quick to set up and get students into, but if you want that extra security you can register for a free account, which will also enable you to save your chat transcripts.

You can enter an example room here: https://todaysmeet.com/exampleroom1

Backchannel Chat: http://www.backchannelchat.com/
Backchannel Chat is a bit more sophisticated and enables students to choose avatars for the chat and more importantly it enables you the teacher to pin a question or message to the top of the chatroom stream so that it doesn’t disappear as students respond. There is both a free version (which is limited to 30 students) as well as paid versions which have larger limits and other features like file adding attachments and personalising avatars with students’ own picture.

You can enter an example room here: http://backchannelchat.com/chat/7x82l

Chatzy: http://www.chatzy.com/
Chatzy offers two options; A quick chat room which you can set up quite quickly and simply (more like TodaysMeet, or a more complex virtual classroom which you can configure to allow students to add various types of online media too, such as images and videos.

You can enter an example room here: http://us21.chatzy.com/55961595316533

Find more tools to use in the digitally connected classroom by downloading my ebook - Digital Tools for Teachers

Check it out

I hope you find backchannels useful with your students and that they help you to integrate technology into your classroom in a more meaningful way.

Related links:

• Managing the digital classroom - Getting students' attention
• Digital Video - A manual for language teachers
• Tap into the Backchannel in Your Presentation 
• 3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations
• Instant back channel chat room 

Best
Nik Peachey

Managing the digital classroom - Getting students' attention

Competing with a computer or mobile screen for students' attention can be a challenge at best and at worst extremely frustrating. In this posting I will share some techniques and approaches for dealing with these problems.

Ban devices

• Obviously this is the simplest way to deal with the problem, however, banning devices in class can be hard to enforce especially with teen students and older. It will also become harder as more technology becomes wearable, and particularly with adult classes, this approach could border on the insulting. 
• Banning devices in the classroom also deprives us and our students of the opportunity to develop responsible approaches to using these devices and robs students of the opportunity to develop their digital literacy skills and exploit the genuine benefits that technology in the classroom can bring.

Turn off the device

• This is much less extreme than banning devices from the class and can be part of a strategy for more responsible use of devices. Have parts of a lesson or even complete lessons when you ask students to turn off their device. 
• In this way the devices can be available when we need them and we can start to build a more responsible though very controlled approach to the use of technology. This becomes more difficult with computers which take much longer to boot up.

Motivational reward

• You can use mobile or computer use as a motivational tool by giving students a break when they have been working well and allowing them a few minutes to use their mobile device or computer freely. 
• This isn't to say that you don't also use them as part of the lesson, but just giving students a short break to check their email or social media can help top reduce their anxiety levels. Remember that many more digitally connected people now have parallel virtual lives happening along side their physical life.

Turn off the screen

• If you have students sitting with a computer screen screen in front of them in a more old fashioned computer room with desktop computers then you can ask them just to turn off the screen when you want their attention. Then they can quite easily turn it back on again when you are ready to get them working again.

Go to the home screen

• Rather than turning the screen off, you can also get students to go to the home screen on the computer or device, until you are ready for them to go back to work.

Turn over

• In the case of tablets or mobile phones an easy solution when you want students' attention is simply to ask them to turn their device over on the desk so the screen is facing downwards. Then as soon as you are ready for them to get back to work they can turn it over again.

Reinforce instructions

• You can use the devices with a backchannel tool like TodaysMeet to reinforce your instructions. As soon as you have given instructions verbally you can add them to the backchannel and then students also have them to refer back to during the activity.
• This can also help them to stay on task and interact with you and each other while they work.

Reduce teacher directed learning

• Think about how you can reduce teacher directed learning and point students towards web based materials where they can learn for themselves. 
• You can use the backchannel tool like TodaysMeet to share links to the materials you want them to investigate. This could be text video or audio materials that you have created yourself or that you have discovered. You can point different groups of students towards different materials sources and then get them to share and compare what they have learned together.
• This approach makes much better use of the technology and helps your students to develop as more autonomous learners. It also demands more from them as critical thinkers and researchers and helps to develop the kinds of real life digital literacy skills they will need. 
• This approach also has benefits for you as a teacher. It takes the spotlight off you and gives you The opportunity to get up close to the students, to monitor what they are doing and steer weaker students in the right direction. 

Controlling the device

• Teach students how to control not be controlled by their mobile device. Many mobile apps are designed to be attention needy. They constantly flash up notifications through messages and sounds which attempt to engage the owner’s  attention. Teach your students how to switch off these attention grabbing alerts so that they can control when they decide to check messages.

Keep doing it
Whichever of these techniques you use, the important thing is to be consistent and persistent. You have to train your students to adopt the kind of responsible behaviour towards their device that you want in your classroom. This isn’t going to happen instantly. You’ll need to stick with it.

Please feel free to share any suggestions or techniques you have for helping to manage a digital classroom.

Related links:

• Managing the digital classroom - Using a backchannel
• Tap into the Backchannel in Your Presentation 
• 3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations
• Instant back channel chat room 
• Digital Video - A manual for language teachers

Best

Nik Peachey

Managing behaviour in the digital age

If you ask most teachers, especially newly trained ones, what one of the biggest challenges of teaching is, they would probably say managing student behaviour. Especially as class sizes grow and more students are bringing along potentially distracting digital devices, making sure you are keeping students on task is becoming ever more important. If this is something that concerns you, then read on.

ClassCharts could be the solution to your problem. ClassCharts is a digital management tool which can help you, your students and their parents to track and improve student behaviour across the whole school.

Using ClassCharts you can set up seating charts for every room in your school and create a profile for each student. Teachers can then use ClassCharts to monitor and reward positive behaviour as well as track negative behaviour. As the teacher builds up data across classes they can start to understand how different seating arrangements and student pairing and grouping can impact on behaviour, then generate seating charts for students that group them in ways that help them to work more efficiently and harmoniously.


So how does it work?

Well one of the first things to do is to add seating plans of your rooms. This is easy to do and you can drag the virtual desks around into whatever configuration you have in your classroom.

Then you also need to upload your students. What I really like about ClassCharts is that you can also upload a photograph of each one, and this can be really useful if you have large classes and lots of students names to remember, especially when it comes to writing reports.

You can then either manually assign seats or generate a random seating chart. During the class you can use ClassCharts acknowledge a range of positive and negative behaviours. These behaviours are all customisable so you can create your own or use the default ones.

ClassCharts uses html 5 so should run in any modern browser whether it’s a laptop, iPad or Android tablet, so the teacher can use an tablet during the class to instantly update behaviours.

Either before or during the class the teacher can also shuffle the class seating depending on a number of criteria from things like attainment targets to gender or previous behaviour.

One of the real time-savers of ClassCharts though is when it comes to report writing time. Each students’ behaviour has been tracked through their various classes and teachers can get a detailed report, including dates when different behaviours were recorded.

Both students and parents can also access live reports and monitor progress throughout the term, so students and parents know how they are doing and parents don’t have to wait until the end of term to find out what’s been going on with their child.

This helps to share responsibility and makes it much easier to get parents involved in dealing with any negative behaviour at the earliest possible date.

Although ClassCharts is free and has been designed so that a single teacher can set it up to track their own classes independently, the real power of the platform is its ability to work across the school and track student behaviour in every class. To make this easier ClassCharts also interconnects with a range of other educational management software systems, from simple tools like Edmodo to more complex ones like SIMS and PowerSchool.


What I like about ClassCharts

• I’m really impressed by the fact that such a powerful and well designed tool is free.
• It’s great that a system like this and the data it collects can be applied and shared across a whole school.
• I really like that you can see the student and access a range of information about them from targets, to behaviour and even a little about their background.
• Great to get parents involved and students monitoring their own progress.

What I’m not so sure about

• This is quite a complex tool and creates a lot of data, so I think it’s going to take a bit of getting used to for teachers and perhaps a bit of training too.
• It does produce a lot of data and you can easily get a bit too tied up in this and forget about the person.

Well I hope you find ClassCharts useful and give it a try.

Related links:

• Digital books for teacher development  
• Making lectures and lessons more interactive with mQlicker  
• Evaluating authentic mobile apps for learning
• Publishing 3.0 - A new model for independent educational publishing 
• The Digital Classrooms on Indiegogo
• Digital Classrooms on Facebook
• Digital Classroom on Flipboard

Nik Peachey

Gamification to encourage learner autonomy

This post tries to pull together a couple of things I have been thinking about recently. The first was a post I saw on the 21st Century Fluency Project blog a few weeks back. The title of the article 'How I Turned My Classroom into a ‘Living Video Game’ caught my eye and before I even had time to read it I started thinking about how the factors that create motivation in computer games could be applied to the classroom. The article is well worth reading, although this is only one element it touches on.

The other thing I have been thinking about recently is time management and distraction as it is one of the more significant objections which teachers often raise to having students using computers and mobile devices in the classroom, so when I saw 'HabitRPG' I thought it could be a useful tool to help deal with the problems and implement more of a gamified approach to the  classroom.

HabitRPG is a time and task management tool which overlays motivational elements of computer games onto managing time and tasks.

The two major motivational elements are health points, which can be used up and coins which can be earned by doing daily tasks, following good habits and doing jobs from your 'Todos' list. These coins can then used to buy rewards.

You can define the rewards for yourself. In my case I decided to define the rewards as the things that I usually do to procrastinate, such as check my email or look at facebook updates etc.

Then you can simply add your list of 'one off' jobs to the 'Todos' list. For me these are things like 'write an article', 'complete a job application', 'update my CV' etc. These become more valuable the longer they are left and so this increase motivation to do them and gain the coins so that you can pay for your rewards.

Then there are my daily chores which I can set up. These are things like 'update my blog' , 'add some links to Scoop.it' , 'search my RSS feeds for interesting articles' etc. If I do these they earn me coins, but if I don't do them by the end of the day I lose health points.

Lastly, there are the habits. These can be positive or negative depending on whether you do them or not, like 'take a walk' or 'have a snack'.

You can edit all of your lists quit simply by clicking on the pen icon, making the changes and then clicking on save and close.

The main thing you may need to edit is the price of rewards and the amount of coins you get for each task.

To change the price of the rewards, you just click the edit icon and then type in the price. The default amount for a reward is 20, but you can adjust the price depending on how much time your reward takes.

To change the amount of coins you are rewarded for doing each task, you need to go to edit and then go into the advanced options and choose, Easy, Medium or Hard. Doing a hard task will of course earn you more coins.

Once you have your lists set up it becomes quite easy just to click the + and - each time you do a task or have a reward.

Everyone starts off with 50 health points and if they have no coins to buy rewards or if they indulge in bad habits then they have to pay with health points. The challenge is to stay alive and build up enough coins to start buying rewards.

So how would this work with students?

• Well you could set the rewards as similar things to my own rewards, especially in a connected classroom. You could also add things like play a game or have a few minutes free browsing time online etc.
• Within the habits you could have things like 'speak L1', 'take notes' or 'copy an answer' etc.
• The daily things could be 'revise vocabulary', 'read a short article', communicate with someone in English', 'do an activity from the course book' etc.
• The 'Todos' could be a range of homework and autonomous learning assignments.

Here's what I imagine an ELT students profile would look like.

You'll need to guide students through the set up process and make sure they understand that for this to work they will need to be honest. You could actually have one page for the whole class, or set a page up for a group of students, but it will probably work better if they manage their own page.

They can also add a few elements of personalisation. If the click on the avatar (top left) there are a range of ways to change its appearance.

What I like about HabitRPG

• It's free and easy to use.
• It can help get students to take responsibility for their 'bad habits' and reduce the amount of 'policing' you have to do.
• It can encourage students to work on single tasks with concentration, rather than constantly multitasking.
• It's a great way to get students to take responsibility for their own time and learning and have some fun at the same time.
• It could increase motivation and help your students to be better organised.
• Students have their own account so they can log in on any computer.

Things I'm not so sure about

• Each student would need to have a computer or mobile device for this to work effectively.
• It would be great to see this on mobile, but I think that is being planned and it does run in the safari browser on iPad.
• There is some down time sometimes.
• Grouping students would also be great, but again I think this is coming.

If you want to know more about HabitRPG, there is quite a long tutorial below which shows a number of other features that you can unlock by playing the game.


I hope you enjoy HabitRPG and that it helps your students to be more organised and disciplined about they way they use their computer or mobile device for learning.

Related links:

• Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• 3D Computer Games with Young Learners
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• Create your own game
• Online Water Conservation Game

Best

Nik Peachey