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Today's Meet

Materials required
Implementation procedure
Strategy in practice

  • Devices (computer or tablet)

  • Internet connection

  1. Navigate to todaysmeet.com.

  2. Name your chat room and tap the ‘Open Your Room’ button.

  3. Copy the URL for the room and distribute it to your class. They can enter the room simply by entering a nickname - their real one or fake - and the backchannel is ready to use.

  4. Today's Meet also offers a suite of teacher tools. For a small monthly or annual fee, these tools provide a few additional features, like pausing a chat to save it for the next day, muting a student who derails the online conversation, and producing a transcript of the chat.

Ryan teaches Chinese in a suburban Michigan high school. From his personal experience learning the language, he found media - in particular, watching videos and newscasts - to be supremely helpful for his language acquisition, so he was encouraged to try the same in his class.

Things to keep in mind

  • Cost: free and paid options, depending on desired features

  • Pros

    • Extremely quick and painless to set up

    • Virtual rooms can be kept open for up to one month, allowing you to reuse the same URL for a few weeks of class.

  • Cons

    • Each chat message is capped at 140 characters, which inhibits sharing lengthier posts.

Ryan selected the first episode of a popular Chinese TV show. He thought the content would be highly engaging for his students but was worried that the vocabulary used was a little above skill level. As a result, he created a Today’s Meet virtual room to help guide the watching session. He thought that having the virtual chat run in parallel to the video would offer a less disruptive experience than him pausing the episode every few minutes to ask for questions.

Ryan requested the school’s class laptop set for the week he planned to show the episode. He set up a Today’s Meet chat room called “Episode 1” and configured it to last one week. Each day, he wrote the URL to access the room on the board. Students navigated to the URL, signed in with their name and had the room open as they watched the show.

 

Since Ryan wasn’t actively teaching during this time, he devoted his attention to moderating the room, answering questions about vocabulary or general plot line as the episode played.

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