Evaluation of Communication Tool:  “TodaysMeet”

CRITERION	SCORE (1-3)	NOTES
Learning Effectiveness	3	- Assesses higher order thinking skills (create, analyze, apply and evaluate) – teacher driven - Provides simulations and real world experiences - teacher driven - When combined with teaching, the application extends the student’s learning
Reliability & Support	3	- Student is able to access the program with no or minimal support - Efficiency in speed and design - Easy to correct errors
Ease of Use	3	- Program automatically saves work - Students at all levels are able to learn the tool easily - Student can use several applications within one tool (video, communication, presentation, audio)
Safety	3	- Ad free - Academic links - Individual login - Secure environment - Class roster to share work & interact with other users controlled by teacher - Age requirement
Technology Requirements	3	- Unlimited free student & staff accounts - Internet cloud storage - Simultaneous collaboration on projects, documents - Web-based - Use on multiple platforms:  laptops iPads, iPods
Curriculum	3	Nonapplicable

TodaysMeet is a wonderful tool for getting feedback and classroom discussions.  The teacher posts a discussion point and students respond.  While instructing the teacher learns from the anonymous or public to the class only what directions the instruction needs to go.  Immediate feedback and comments provide even the most bashful student a comfortable environment to share with either the class or just the teacher. 

A language arts class could use TodaysMeet to create a rotating story.  Someone would start the story and students would take turns finishing by each adding a sentence.  The story may end up in a totally different place than any of the participants might have anticipated.

Similar to Twitter the responses cannot be more than 140 characters so students are encouraged to say more with less.  Unfortunately students have to be older than 13 to participate.  That’s a problem for me since all of my kiddos are younger than 13 even though we could really benefit from using TodaysMeet.