Today's Meet: Not Your Average Reading Discussion! (Mrs. Bars)

My students have completed their iPad Permit tests using Socrative, filmed and directed thoughtful and fun skits for their independently designed "Top 10 iPad Rules for Room 5" and we are ready to dive right in!

For our first experience with using the iPads as a curriculum tool I wanted to focus on ELA. We are currently reading Tuck Everlasting which has a heavy theme that promotes deep thinking on the part of students. However, as we all know it can be a challenge to push all students to participate in discussion and feel comfortable doing so. So, that's where Today's Meet came in…

Students navigated their way to the Today's Meet link I had previously created for this chapter and we began by discussing the format and collaboratively came up with some ground rules. I was really impressed by how much they already knew about character limits for venues such as this or twitter! The most important ground rule we set was about posting appropriate and related content on Today's Meet. For our first time using Today's Meet I provided students with a lot of structure, allowing them to only "say" thinking that is related to the prompts I had provided them. We began by jig sawing preview vocabulary for the chapter we were going to read that day. Students would be posting sentences full of context clues to hint at the words meaning. This is an activity we do often in class (with pencil and paper) so it was helpful that they already knew the drill for our first time using Today's Meet. Groups shared their vocabulary and we were all able to follow along and discuss each contribution on the feed.

Next we practiced our "iPads down" skills! I anticipated a challenge in asking students (especially of this age) to transition from using the iPad to putting it to sleep and turning it over to read a chapter of our book. However, they were GREAT about the transition and were seemingly really motivated to follow the iPad rules they had previously been a part of creating.

We went back to Today's Meet after reading chapter 18, which has an awesome cliff hanger, and students were given time to independently post, or "say" as Today's Meet calls it, their predictions for chapter 19.

It was an incredible experience to watch how motivated my students were to post their thinking on Today's Meet and I loved watching them read and react to their peer's predictions on the feed. Overall, I found using this in the classroom as a discussion tool to be valuable. After the lesson, we debriefed as a class about the pros and cons of using Today's Meet and I received the following feedback from my kiddos :

• it allowed students who are shy to share their ideas
• when we shared our vocabulary sentences, if I couldn't hear the person it was OK because I could see what they wrote
• typing on the iPad is the opposite of what you teach us to do on computers and we need to "peck" more so the outside of our hands don't hit the return button and accidents post things we aren't ready to post ( I hadn't though of this, great point!)
• only having a certain amount of characters to use makes you think more about what you are going to write