Today's Meet- Chatroom for Classroom Activities and Idea Sharing

Today's Website~

● Today's Meet 

Today's Meet

 

 

What is it about?

●  It is more like a chat room for students in English class.

●  The teacher creates a room and invites students to join the classroom talk.

●  Students follow the link and start the classroom activities.

Why is the content good for language teaching?

●  Encourage students "talk" and communicate in the virtual room

●  Encourage students to read other students' language outcome.

●  Encourage students to share opinions and respect one another

●  It is interactive.  Everyone has a chance to speak out their ideas, especially shy students.

●  Encourage students to work collaboratively or individually

●  Sudents could learn from one another from reading the instant response.

●  Help teachers to assess students' language output after language input

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

●  First, introduce students Internet Etiquette in the virtual room, e.g. how to greet

●  The teacher could either ask individual student to make sentences (e.g.

    with past tense) to make sure they understand the grammar, or ask students

    to work in group to make a story (e.g. with past tense, words students learn

    in class or a topic related to your curriculum).  Each group takes turns to write a

    sentence.  The story should be cohesive and reasonable.  The teacher can give

    guidance to help students use appropriate linguistic meanings of  expression

    and generate appropriate content.  The story should be cohesive and reasonable.

    (The teacher could introduce conjunctions)

●  The teacher can encourage low-proficiency to key in the vocabulary,

    words or sentences they hear or they remember from the last lesson or

    some topics (e.g. Name one animal you know).  If the teachers would like to

    know whether students are familiar with the sentence patterns and the content,

    the teacher could ask simple questions and encourage students to answer

    them to check their understanding and students' language output  (e.g.

    What does Mary usually do before she goes to bed?).

●  The teacher could ask high-proficiency students what they know about the topic

    and the experience about the topic they are going to learn.  The teacher could also

    check students' understanding by asking them to answer certain questions

    in class or at home. 

●  The teacher could print out the script and assess students' in-class performance, and also

     it could be used to reflect the teacher's own teaching and revise the curriculum, adjusting

     to students' learning process.

●  The students could always go into the room and review something they are

    unfamiliar or reflect their answers, or print out the transcript.

Limitations

●  Might need computers for everyone in order to assess individual performance

●  If it is a large class, it might take students lots of time to read everything in

    a short time.

●  Students still need to "speak out" to practice their speaking, pronunciation and

    communicating skills.

●  Might take teachers too much time to assess students' performance if they

    have too many students to teach in a short time.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Example~ 

TodaysMeet

Our Tutors Russell and Tilly created a room for us to sharing the ideas about

the tool "Wordsift" we learned in class. The link is: http://www.todaysmeet.com/wordsift

Here is the transcript:

● Transcript of the "Ideas about Wordsift"

    The transcript: