Chat

Intro

The Chat activity allows you to create live, synchronous discussions within your lesson, enabling students to engage with each other in real time. You can use Chat to facilitate conversations around a topic, guide debate, or support collaborative thinking, even when students are in different locations.

Unlike asynchronous tools, Chat creates a shared moment of interaction, where students contribute, respond, and build on ideas instantly. This makes it a powerful tool for active learning and immediate engagement.

Why you want to use a chat as an educational activity?

• Enable real-time discussion so students can exchange ideas instantly rather than waiting for delayed responses

• Foster collaboration by encouraging students to respond to and build on each other’s contributions

• Promote active participation by giving every student a voice in the conversation

• Make thinking visible as students articulate their reasoning and challenge perspectives

• Monitor engagement by observing who is contributing and how frequently

• Identify misconceptions quickly by spotting incorrect or unclear ideas as they emerge

• Create a sense of presence and community in online or distributed learning environments

How does Chat works?

You provide a clear discussion prompt, question, or set of instructions to guide the conversation.

Students can:

• Send messages to the chat in real time

• Reply to each other’s messages, creating threaded or flowing discussions

• Engage simultaneously with peers who are online at the same time

As the discussion unfolds, you can facilitate, prompt, or intervene to steer the conversation, highlight key ideas, or address misunderstandings.

Educational Insight

As a teacher, you are able to track student participation and encourage participation and collaboration.

What can you use Chat for?

Chat is a simple way to conduct synchronous discussion where you want students to share views and collaborate to expand on a topic or idea.

Pedagogies that use Chat: Reciprocal Learning, Think-Pair-Share, Predict Observe Explain, etc.