A few years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of attending a pre-conference workshop led by David Warlick.  If you’ve ever attended a session led by Mr. Warlick, you’ll know that he likes to run a “backchannel” for the audience to interact with each other.  From time to time, he will reference the backchannel discussion in the body of the session.  This was actually my first experience with backchannels, and, at first,  I thought it was a little odd, until the session really got going.  Then, the backchannel came alive with the audience responding to what Mr. Warlick was speaking about, asking each other questions, sharing resources and links.  In short, the backchannel ended up being at least as useful as the actual session.

I often wondered what it would have been like to run a backchannel during one of my physics classes, but by this time, I had already left the classroom and, frankly, the tools to easily do such a thing just didn’t exist.  The explosion of Web 2.0 tools and microblogging has really changed that in the last year or so.  It would be possible to run a backchannel discussion completely in Twitter, for example.  Twitter is a great tool, but it does lack certain features that would be handy for a backchannel discussion.

One tool that does have these features is CoveritLive.  CoveritLive is an extremely robust and scalable live blogging app that you may have seen used by bloggers to cover live events such as Apple’s keynotes.  I’ve been in CoveritLive sessions already with hundreds of other users and experienced no difficulties.  CoveritLive can easily scale down, as well, making it a handy way to create a backchannel in the classroom.  The basic version of CoveritLive has a plethora of features, is free, and doesn’t have any embedded ads.  If you need the premium feature set, you have the option to use a free version with advertising or pay for a subscription to remove the ads.  In most cases, though, the basic version should have everything you need.

Some of the top features include embedding of YouTube and Google videos (also ustream, livestream, and qik), a media library to easily add static images, audio, and text, and even a way to quickly create and publish polls (student response system on the fly!).  It’s also extremely easy to embed the CoveritLive session in a classroom blog post or Web page, which makes it very easy for students to access it.  The presenter has the option of moderating user comments or allowing users to post comments immediately to the live blog.  The presenter can also respond privately to a user.  After the live session ends, the embedded CoveritLive display on your site goes into “Instant Replay” mode, providing a record of the discussion.

Strengths:

• Rich feature set provides plenty of options for powerful backchannel discussions
• Ease of sharing multimedia content
• Free, with no ads
• Quick Poll system makes a great student response system substitute
• CoveritLive sessions can be easily embedded in a class blog or website

Weaknesses:

• The large number of features and options means you will need to spend some time to familiarize yourself with the system
• No reader authentication methods in Basic version
• No information available on how long past sessions are kept

Overall, CoveritLive is a very powerful application for providing a classroom backchannel.  The ease of use for both teacher and student makes this a very attractive tool for classroom use.  The only concern I have is how long recorded sessions remain available for access.  I wasn’t able to locate anything that explicitly mentioned that on the CoveritLive website.

CoveritLive is available in several versions: free Basic service with no ads, free Premium service with ads, paid Premium service without ads.  Pricing information can be obtained by contacting CoveritLive sales directly.  The system requirements aren’t too demanding.  They recommend a computer with broadband internet access, a recent major browser (it’s noted that even IE 6 works fine), and 2 GB of memory.  Presenters will need to create a free account to create the live event session.

<a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=6bf498dda9″ mce_href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;altcast_code=6bf498dda9″ >CoveritLive Test</a>