TodaysMeet

What is TodaysMeet?

TodaysMeet is a virtual online meeting room that allows for communication and collaboration without time and space limit. Anyone, as long as you can access the internet, could create a room, save the web address and send it to your students or classmates or colleagues so that they can enter the room and have an online conversation.

How to use TodaysMeet?

1. Go to http://todaysmeet.com/.

2. Name your room (If there's a red cross under the name of your room, then it's not available. Usually, just add a number after the name, and it would become available.)

3. Select how long you want this room to be available for, ranging from 2 hours to one year. And then click 'Create your Room'.

4. Copy the web address of your room and send it to whoever you want them to join.

5. For students or people other than the room creator, go to this web address and type in your name.

6. Type in whatever you want to say and simply click 'say'. 

7. All people's talk will be presented immediately in the 'Listen' box on the left of the page.

8. After you finish all your conversations, you can save the transcription for future reference.

Why should language teachers use TodaysMeet?

• It's about sharing knowledge and ideas and even questions.
• It stimulates collaborative language learning because not only teachers but also students have the freedom to express their own ideas and also 'listen' to others' ideas.
• It is classroom-based group, but it doesn't have any time or space limitations.
• For most of the time, students' talk are language output. Students construct their own language, through which they collaboratively construct ideas. The rationale behind this online virtual classroom is constructivist language learning.
• It's very easy to use and all the conversation can be saved or downloaded for future reference.
• In a traditional conversation, normally, only one people could speak at one time, otherwise, it would be very noisy and people cannot follow clearly what others say. TodaysMeet allows for multi-speaker conversation at the same time without missing others' talk becasue they can read the transcription later.
• It enhances multi-dimentional conversation flow: teacher to students, students to teacher, and student to student interactions.
  
• There's no need to register or create an account, which would normally take much time. (This idea comes from my friend and classmate East.)

How can TodaysMeet foster language learning?

1. After class online Q&A between students and teachers.

It often happens when after class, students go to ask teacher questions individually and the teacher may answer the same question many times to different students. Or there may be a situation where student A think of a question but other students don't, in this case, they may never have the opportunity to think of the question or know the answer to it. An after class online Q&A session on TodaysMeet can solve these problems so that the teacher can answer once for all and students can share others' questions they haven't thought of and 'listen' to the teacher's answer.

2. After class pair work/group work task discussion.

Usually, students don't have many opportunities to meet each other and discuss pair work or group work face to face. In this case, students within a pair or group could simply create a room on TodaysMeet and discuss their assignments or tasks online. Additionally, the teacher can ask students to send him/her the transcription of their discussion to check and therefore give certain help when necessary. The teacher  may even join the students' discussion but it may be too time consuming.

3. Classroom simultaneous feedback for report or presentation.

This is only adaptable when all the students have their own PC and access to the internet in the classroom. For example, group A is giving a report or a presentation or a role play in front of the class, other students, as well as the teacher, in the classroom can give simultaneous feedback by writing down some notes or comments on Group A's performance. After the presentation, students in Group A could see the feedback from the teacher and all their classmates. This activity can develop students' ability of evaluation and reflection, as well as critical thinking, which are high level learning abilities.

BTW, this method can also be adapted in an academic conference where there is an off-line real life presentation by the lecturer, and meanwhile, an online discussion between the audience.

What are the limitations of TodaysMeet?

• It can be easily replaced by other online communication tools, such as Facebook (you can build a group on Facebook to chat), or chat rooms in Skype or QQ (a Chinese online chatting software).
• You cannot upload or share any document online through TodaysMeet. It's very common when people discuss ideas online, they may want to share a Word or PPT or PDF document with others. The lack of this function sometimes may result in inefficient or inconvenient online communication.