CoveritLive for Class Discussions: Art Titzel
Reviewer: Art Titzel
Position: 8th grade American Cultures Teacher
District/School: Derry Township School District, Hershey Middle School, PA
Number of Students in District/School: 3,500/900
Product: CoveritLive
Goals:
1. Extend classroom discussions to live events such as presidential debates, state of the union, and other events that would normally be classroom discussions.
2. Use as a way to hold moderated evening review sessions prior to exams.
3. Connect with classes from around the world.
Response:
Most students love the opportunity to connect with one another outside of school—even for academic purposes. Some parents expressed shock that their child would spend his/her own time to seriously discuss the current events online.
Learning Curve:
CoveritLive is relatively easy to use. There are numerous options for creating a live event, but CoveritLive provides easy to use tutorials in their Support Center. Events need to be created in advance. I also recommend creating a practice event with a few of your colleagues prior to going live with students.
How We Use It:
I save relevant links and create polls with questions I want to ask during the debate. CoveritLive allows
you to pre-plan an event with audio, images, video, links, polls, and pre-written text. The more content you add ahead of time the better.
Once the pre-planning is done I copy and paste the embed code into my class Wiki, where students access the event. I always announce to the students when the event will go live and how long it will last. When time arrives I launch the event and begin to moderate the student comments. Time goes very quickly during an event because as a moderator you are commenting, approving student comments, direct messaging students who did not follow posting expectations, adding media content, and generally guiding the discussion.
It is possible to allow a certain number of people to post comments without moderation. Most of my students respect the expectations and comment appropriately, because they know this is a class event that is archived for replay. The next day in class we typically take time to discuss the actual event and our CoveritLive event.
Whats Ahead?:
I want to continue to use CoveritLive for involving students in relevant live events outside the classroom, such as the upcoming 2012 election debates and election night, as well as for connecting with other classes from around the world.
