I'm going to share my favorite tool of late: "Cover It Live." In short, it's a quick and slick way to blog live events. But it can be so much more...

Let's first look at why you'd want to use this tool for blogging a live event rather than just posting your notes within a 'normal' blog post. Take a look at these two examples:

The first one is from one of my favorite Educator/Bloggers, Wes Fryer. This post is Wes' notes from a live presentation posted right into his blog. You can see how it takes up a lot of real estate on the page. Here are the notes that David Warlick recently took at a presentation, using Cover It Live. You can see that it only needs a little bit of the page because it's being "pumped in" from Cover It Live and has scroll bars for the lengthy notes. This alone makes Cover It Live attractive, but the big benefit in using this method over Wes Fryer's method is that while David was blogging, other folks were also able to post comments into the notes, which David decided to include or not ---much like a chat window, but with the benefit of being able to be moderated. (Note: When looking at the example I've cited, you can't see the option of adding comments because you're looking at a previously recorded post. If this were live, you would see this option at the bottom of the window). So in essence, you can invite other people to assist you in creating the notes for the live presentation. It's very easy to include their input and once you know/trust the writer, you can even have Cover It Live automatically accept all subsequent comments from that person. It's just as easy to "ban" a user and there is even the option of inviting other people to co-produce the notes, giving them the role of moderating/banning users and comments (you'll need to invite them via email and they will need to register for a Cover It Live account).

In order to use Cover It Live, the user sets up a "live blog" at the Cover It Live site. The live blog can be scheduled for some future date, or started instantly. There are many options for customizing the look, size, and features of each blog set up. Once created, the user is given some html code to embed on his/her blog, wiki, or website. Email invitations/reminders can be sent out directly from the site to let folks know about the event. When you embed the live blog on your site, readers can also enter their email address to have a reminder sent to them for when the event will start.

To start live blogging, the creator or the co-producer simply types his/her notes over on the Cover It Live site, and the words are instantly ported over to the embeded window (on the person's blog, wiki, website, or wherever else it's been embeded). The live blogging can be paused and resumed later. The writer can easily upload and include audio, video, images, links, polls, and pre-written text right into the notes to share with the audience. This can all be uploaded and organized before the "show" starts or done "on the fly" during the blogging. When the blogger is done, he/she simply stops recording and the event can now be replayed on the site that it's been embeded on.

In the classroom, you can set up a Cover It Live account to have either all or just a few of your students take notes during class, that will immediately be posted on the classroom blog page. Give one student the job of moderating the comments.

I'm excited about Cover It Live as a tool for taking notes of presentations, but I'm even more excited to use it in a different scenario: As a Backchannel Chat these days to include a "backchannel" and allow for their audience to have a voice during their presentations in an effort to break the "lecture-type" mode of teaching and allow for conversation. Many educators have started implementing this technique in their classrooms as well. Cover It Live serves as an excellent tool to allow for this dialogue. Think of the student who is reticent to raise her/his hand yet may write down a question in the backchannel and you see one major benefit instantly. Use the backchannel as a means of collecting previous knowledge or to check in with students' understanding.

Currently, Cover It Live is completely free. According to the site, they will probably always have a free version and offer "additional pay-per-use features."

Bob Sprankle has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.

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