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.

Count on Google to push the edge of the envelope. According to their blog, they’re trying to get musicians from all over to form an online orchestra. It appears that video from YouTube will play a big part in getting this work. Other than that, I’m a little stumped how you can play music together without being in the same place, but I’m looking forward to finding out. This is one collaboration that should be very interesting.

We spent today’s Social Studies classes with my two sections of Grade 9s coming up with and then choosing questions on what people know and understand about Canada and being Canadian. It was tough to keep 50 Grade 9s on track and distill their hundreds of questions down into only ten for our survey, but we did.

The next step was to go to Google Docs and set up a spreadsheet and a form with our questions. It took a little bit of tinkering (which I made sure I did a few days ago so I would know the project would actually work), but I got it all in there.

Going a bit further with Google, I then took that form to Google Sites where I’d set up a simple website (for free, of course) and embedded our form from Google Docs into our Google Site. That took a bit of figuring because the way to do it is not immediately obvious. It’s really simple once you know how, but, of course, you have to know how first.

If you’re a bit technically minded (the supergeek) you can add a subdomain to your Google Site. You can find our site at either http://sites.google.com/site/whatsacanadian/ or http://www.canada.ishere.info. Either address will work for you.

Now, hopefully, we can get hundreds of people to fill in our online survey. If you get the chance, please do that in the next few days. It would make the project a lot more interesting for the kids. Then we get to sit down and analyze the results. It should be interesting.