Rubric: TodaysMeet in a Secondary English Classroom

Technology use in the classroom is somewhat of a bluebird of happiness for English teachers. English Language Arts by contemporary definition necessitates a complicated interweb of communication—reading, writing, speaking, listening, observing (we'll call them Rx5)—and in many cases these are not the methods to achieve content ends but they are the content ends. In a math classroom, students need to be able to participate in these five forms of communication in order to understand, apply, and create new material based on mathematical concepts. But in an English classroom, students need to understand and apply these communication for their own sake. That's part of what English teachers grade students on. It's a large part. Nearly all of the part?

Technology as the bluebird of happiness

TodaysMeet, then, certainly drops a few bright blue feathers in the path of haggard English teachers who are constantly looking for technology tricks that will enhance their classroom so that students both can excel individually in Rx5 and as a class. First, TodaysMeet gets students using technology. That in itself fulfills the urgent, sometimes spoken and sometimes unspoken, compulsion of the Common Core Standards toward increased integration of technology in classroom models. Second, students are writing. This is no easy feat, especially in the younger grades of junior high ("Ms. Cash! I need to sharpen my pencil/ can't find my pencil/ need an eraser/ accidentally stabbed my left toe with my pencil and now it's bleeding can I go to the office?"). Third, students are writing about what they are hearing, observing, and hopefully for some at least what they are speaking. Fourth, TodaysMeet provides an automatic digital footprint of individual student work and of the trek of the whole class through a period, a week, a unit. Does it get much better than this?

It does. TodaysMeet gives a voice (and a "pencil") to an entire class and to shy students who wouldn't willingly speak out in whole group. It allows for a beautiful, rapid-fire conversation among students. You might say that technological models like TodaysMeet were crafted with the lower orders of Bloom's Taxonomy in mind—it is ideal for arranging, listing, matching, reproducing, and labeling. With careful teacher guidance, it can even be used for constructing, demonstrating, calculating, questioning, and testing. But the sustained and reflective practice needed for the upper orders of Bloom's doesn't naturally fit with the instantaneous, broad-versus-deep platform TodaysMeet offers. What about deep, edited responses to deep edited responses of another student? What about generating communication through multiple mediums, not just words but also colors, shape, sound? (English teachers care about these things too!)

And then there is the question of providing up to thirty-six students or at twelve small groups with iPads or computers. Perhaps most technology rubrics assume that technology is available—or they list availability as the first assessment. But again, especially in the younger grades, it is not simple or necessarily desirable by any means to pass out iPads to certain doom. Our fifth period seventh grade English class spent fifteen minutes last Tuesday trying to find out by all manner of secret ballot and personal pleading which student it was who locked one of the iPads used in the class the day before. 

Sometimes technology has matured to a point beyond that of our students.

Platforms like TodaysMeet truly are bluebirds of happiness—for very specific uses, with very specific purposes, when technology offers the most learning-friendly opportunity for Rx5 skills, and when teachers know that students won't habitually lock the iPads.