My One Best Moment

Sandra McCarthy

My One Best Moment

• My best ICT moment revolves around

introducing my students to social media.

• I wanted my students to have a safe and

secure environment in which to learn

about communicating with others online.

Web 2.0 resources• My first step in introducing students to social media was

via TodaysMeet.com. These rooms are free of charge and

can be created by anyone. In relation to privacy, access to

these rooms is limited to those who have the IP address,

www.todaysmeet.com/???? for the room you create.

• When a room is created it remains open for a designated

time, you can choose anywhere between a couple of

hours and one year. I generally chosen to have my rooms

open for one week at a time.

TodaysMeet

• I used TodaysMeet to introduce social

media and began using it for classroom

activities such as recording take home

reading books. and for students to

respond individually to general

classroom discussion questions.

• This has allowed me to track what

books students have out each day.

• It has enabled individuals to have

thinking time and be able to answer

questions individually without having

the answer called out.

www.todaysmeet.com

• The bonus of introducing TodaysMeet.com to my

students was that they began communicating with each

other outside of the classroom. Students were saying

hello to each other, telling friends what they had for

dinner. One of the Mums even wished all the mothers a

Happy Mother’s Day via our room.

• My students were engaged with TodaysMeet.com. They

chatted to each other over the weekends and requested

that I have a room open for them to communicate with

each other during the school holidays.

• Todaysmeet.com has been an

interesting platform that has enabled

conversations to develop around

their responsibilities and use of

appropriate language while

communicating with other people

electronically.

Challenges Faced• As with many things a negative has

arisen from this positive

environment.

• Recently I had students who chose to

log in under other peoples names

and make inappropriate comments.

• While the students were spoken to

about this being inappropriate it

happened again and the comments

were causing discomfort for those

whose names were being used as the

logins.

User Friendly?

• Yes- todaysmeet.com is easy to use.

• It only asks you to enter your name,

click on join and then start posting

your comments.

Editable / Monitorable

• As a college we have found that it is not

easy to remove unwanted comments and it

is virtually impossible to trace who the

perpetrator was.

• Todaysmeet.com is an American site and

there is no facility for the room host to

delete posts.

• Any requests for removing posts and/or closing a

room early must be done by email to the creator

and deleting of posts and room closures are done at

their discretion.

• I did receive a reply to my request for information,

however due to time zone differences there was a

significant time delay.

• They were happy to close my room early after

supplying them details of the comments and the

room address.

My Reactions

• These incidents left me questioning

the use of social media in my

classroom.

• I decided that I would not generate

anymore todaysmeet.com rooms and

thus the search began, with the

assistance of our ICT department, for an

alternative that provided a higher level of

monitoring, identification and the ability

to monitor and manipulation of student

posts from within the classroom.

Outcome• During our ICT – SIT a new web 2.0

tool was discussed, Padlet -

http://padlet.com

• Padlet is a renamed, updated version

of wallwisher.

www.padlet.com

• After being shown around the

features and playing with making

posts on a wall created for the

meeting I decided to create my own

login and have set up a page / wall to

use with my students.

How we use Padlet• Student’s record their Take Home

Book titles.

• Student’s list their interests for

Investigations sessions (Walker

Learning Approach).

www.padlet.com/wall/1sandra

www.padlet.com/wall/investigations1s

The Journey continues…

• I am excited about this next step in

my journey and my students journey

in developing the skills and

responsibilities they will need to be

confident and safe web 2.0 users.