The Backchannel

On Saturday at the CLS Tech conference, I went to a talk entitled, "Using the Backchannel to Empower Students" by John Miller.  (Notes from this talk available as a Google Doc here.)  This was a great talk by a practicing teacher about using the concept of the backchannel in class.  We'd been introduced to the idea at the keynote the day before, but at this workshop I was able to use my Android phone to actually participate in the backchannel.

The basic idea is that you use an online service that allows you and the rest of the audience to send short notes in real time while you are listening to a presentation or a speaker.  You can use Twitter and mark all your comments with a hash agreed on beforehand or you can use one of several online services (TodaysMeet and Chatzy were two that he suggested) or Edmodo or you can create a Google Doc that is shared with everybody.  At the beginning of the presentation, you announce the address and then the audience (or class) can ask questions, make comments, disagree, or whatever.  Think of it as the substitute for talking behind your hand or passing notes.

It was pretty exciting to participate in the backchannel during the presentation.  Audience members threw out additional ideas, their opinions about the tools, and even asked a few questions.  In the presentations at the conferences that used backchannels, some put it on the group screen for a short time, and others never looked at it during the presentation.

John described how he used the backchannel in class as a way of checking for understanding by asking a question aloud but then the responses are sent on the backchannel.  He also used it while Skyping in guest speakers by having six or so students using the backchannel to summarize what was said.  For some other ideas about how to use this tool in the classroom, check out this blog post.

Because we work mostly with small groups at our school, I'm not sure how useful a backchannel would be for our work with kids.  It also requires 1:1 computing, which we don't have in a large group.  I'm thinking it would be interesting when I do presentations for adults and could give me a lot of useful feedback about the work I do in curriculum consulting.