[Tool sharing] Today's Meet

Have you ever had issues with trying to get students to actively speak up in class whenever you ask them questions or are trying to hold a discussion? Especially with Asian, shy, or students that are not close, sometimes it is difficult to nudge them to voluntarily answer your questions or chip in some thoughts and ideas to the topic. It does not mean that they do not know the answer or are not thinking; they probably just feel less motivated to speak up, intimidated by the anticipation of their teacher and peers looking at them as they speak up. Thus, Today's Meet is a good online chatroom for teachers to use to stimulate student response during class discussion.

What is Today's Meet? 

Today's Meet is a simple and free tool that anyone can use. You can log in with your Google account and create a chatroom for your students to use. In the screenshot above, you can see the different kinds of settings you can adjust for your chatroom. The name for your room is also the URL of your chatroom to share with the students, so there might be a limitation to picking a suitable name that has not been taken already. But this function is quite convenient, since once you have selected a name, you can just post the URL to your students via email, social media, or just have them type it in their URL bar on their own since the link is quite simple and straightforward.

Next, you may adjust the availability of the classroom. You can keep it from one week up to one year. With this function, you can keep the chatroom open for a longer period of time and assign students to go on the chatroom to talk about discussion questions assigned as homework, or to reflect with their peers about the in-class activities. Since the interface of Today's Meet is very simple and straight-forward, teachers will not have to worry about students getting lost or confused with using the website.

Advantages and disadvantages of Today's Meet 

As you can see from the screenshot above, the teacher can post a question in the chatroom and students can key in their response to the question. There is a colorcode function which can be visually easier for teachers and students to distinguish between each other. However, if you notice the character limit above the message box, you can only key in 140 characters at once. There are pros and cons to that-- with the word limit, Today's Meet would be quite fitting for a pre-task as teachers can ask general questions as a gist task to activate students' prior knowledge. The short limit will help ease students' anxiety as it reassure them that they do not have to write a whole academic and professional paragraph to answer the question, but just a simple, brief idea that they have. On the other hand, the character limit restricts Today's Meet to just gist tasks. If teachers want to go in-depth with the task and want to stimulate more communicative output and critical thinking, then Today's Meet would not be suitable as students cannot fully express themselves, therefore, this may restrict their flow of logical reasoning and thinking. This also implies that the word limit and the lack of variety in functions also hinders natural and collaborative interaction between the students. It may restrict more interaction than in the physical classroom when students are conversing face to face. 

Lastly, Today's Meet allows teachers and students to save the transcript of the conversation. This function is helpful for teachers, since they can use the transcript to assess students' interlanguage and use this to structure and design the next language focused task. This is useful for evaluating and teaching spoken English grammar, collocations and vocabulary, but may not be suitable to assess writing ability since the restrictions and function of the chatroom only allows casual, simple and brief responses. 

Therefore, I suggest using Today's Meet as an icebreaker instead, to help students open up and warm up to their peers, and to help them feel comfortable expressing themselves with other colleagues. Today's Meet may possibly be a good support for the teachers to encourage students' participation and reduce their anxiety as they are gradually lead out from their comfort zone. Today's Meet is simple and easy to use for digital-immigrants as well, so teachers that are experiencing student anxiety or silence may give this tool a try!