Blog #7 Backchannel Chat - Live access chat

According to Techopedia, a backchannel is  the use of networked computer and instant messaging software in a learning or team-based work environment to provide private or one-to-one communication between the student/listener and the teacher/speaker. The backchannel tool is very useful in my field of work -- teaching English as a second language to international university students in Canada. 

The classes I deliver, help plan, and run occasional technology workshops with commonly focus around using technology as a collaborative and communicative tool. At Dalhousie, my current school, as with most university classrooms across Canada, we are equipped with projectors and a desktop in every classroom. Considering the above then, you might see how useful backchannel network can be.

Basically, what a good backchannel app can do is provide quick, hassle-free, access for students to post text on a common page. This page is projected on the board in the center of the classroom. So, for example, the instructor writes a  question on the board "What is the role of journalism in society?". The students then text out their answers on the backchannel and in a real time thread, it pops up on the board.

Until recently, one of the most valuable and recommended tools for backchanneling I had in my toolkit and one was Today's Meet. It was 100% free, had a clear user-friendly interface, required no membership, was free of any ads, and had a very handy projector switch for the teacher to use in the classroom. I always bragged that it was possible to open a chat thread and get people chatting in less than a minute, without even having a membership. Unfortunately, after ten years, and being used widely, the group who ran Today's Meet decided to move onto better things and retired the site. 

To fill the gap since the retirement, I have been exploring other backchannel pages and apps. It is hard to beat the overall smart layout and ease that todaysmeet had. 

The closest program I have found is called Backchannel Chat. With a strikingly similar interface, and almost as fast a set-up time, it is quite a good option. It is ad-free, allows students to instantly join without membership, and generally works glitch free. The one big difference, and this is an aesthetic one, is the avitars (see image below). With no option to remove, every participant is assigned an avitar. Unfortunatly, they are quite tacky and childish and clash with the spirit of an academic classroom. 

Although I have not paid for the gold version of Backchannel chat, it seems to be quite good for more student collaboration tools and mixed media messages. The gold membership will allow teachers to embed polls, save chats for long periods of time, and incorporate videos, tweets, and other media within the chats themselves. 

One question I did have about this website/ app was that of privacy. The students are not required to sign-up and the instructor merely needs to provide any email address. I might be concerned if the privacy of the chats was being compromised, who had access to the chat threads, and whether the information was being funneled off to third parties. We do have a privacy protocol at our school, and digging deeper might reveal that these "free" backchannel chat rooms are selling our classroom discussions. 

Although they may be entertaining, I find the Backchannel Chat user-icon style to be tacky and distracting.