"Todays Meet"--Benefits of Back Channeling in the Classroom

Last semester, during my time in a special education course, I was introduced to “TodaysMeet”, an extremely effective online tool that extended the class's ability to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas during the various class sessions. This back-channeling site provides users with a communicative atmosphere similar to that of a “chat room”; our instructors encouraged us to actively use this tool all throughout our class lectures, and I found it extremely useful in regards to our abilities to clarify, question, and explain the class's complex ideas and concepts."TodaysMeet", and the site's easily manipulated back-channeling capabilities, if used appropriately, can be an amazing resource for implanting  social literacy skills within our classroom. Social literacy can be thought of as the acquirement of the critical social skills needed to properly behave and actively participate within everyday society.

As we all know as college students, life in no cake walk--because of the daily grind that we are all forced to endure, multitasking is an absolute social necessity. The use of "TodaysMeet" in the classroom has the potential to introduce these valuable social skills to our students. As Silvia Tolisano states in her article, these types of back-channeling technologies force students to engage in a number of social skills simultaneously--in addition to paying close attention to and participating in face-to-face dialogue, students are also encouraged to consistently post individualized ideas of their own and consider/reflect upon the comments that are posted by their peers. As Tolisano suggests, students must understand that back-channeling is no easy task; being able to engage in a focused, multifaceted conversation through the use of various communicative mediums requires a great deal of conversational discipline. Thus, the skills developed through back-channeling sites such as "TodaysMeet" allow students to appropriately and collaboratively interact with colleagues, a skill that they must eventually master in order to contribute to society.