Every once in a while I need a way to chat with a group. The other day I was in on a conference call and wanted to chat with two other people but not the rest of the group. I thought our little sub-group needed to confer, but on a conference call there’s no way to just walk off into a separate room and talk amongst yourselves.
In class I like to encourage the kids to collaborate. They will e-mail each other across the room (and it’s often even on topic) but they can only talk to one person at a time. They often are searching for solutions that the whole group could come up with together.
In either case I could set up a chat room. In the first case I don’t want to leave the room up indefinitely because our conversation was private. In the second case I don’t want to leave the student chat up indefinitely because I have to maintain student privacy, and, well, students have been known to publicly post things they probably shouldn’t. A permanent chatroom is not the answer.
A cool solution seems to be in Today’s Meet. It allows you to set up a chatroom that can last anywhere from 12 hours to one year. Since the chatroom is made up and shortly deleted, only the people you give the URL to will be able to access it. You don’t have to worry about outsiders crashing your party and making your private discussion public. It’s dead simple to use Today’s Meet. It’s very nice.
The URL link is broken. I think it should be http://www.todaysmeet.com.
Thanks for that, DoctorJ. I’ve got it fixed now.
Hey Linus,
As the creator of Today’s Meet, I wanted to say thanks for the good words.
Privacy is always important to educators, so my highest priority is implementing password-protected rooms. I hope it will remove a barrier for teachers concerned with privacy laws.