This morning I gave a keynote presentation at the Future Schools Expo. As I often do, I created a TodaysMeet room for people to share thoughts in response to some of the prompts that I give during my keynote. At some point during my keynote the link to the TodaysMeet room was shared on Twitter. That Tweet gave more visibility to the TodaysMeet room which led to spammers posting very inappropriate comments in the room.

Mistakes and Lessons
This morning I did not required registration in order to use my TodaysMeet room. I left it open because I wanted to make it as easy as possible for audience members to join. And I trusted that everyone in the audience would use the TodaysMeet room appropriately. I didn’t plan on spammers because that had never been a problem over the last three years of using TodaysMeet during my keynotes.

In the future I will either require registration to join the conversation or just use Twitter and a hashtag for my backchannel. The downside to both of those options is that they create barriers to participation.

In a classroom setting I will always enable moderation on TodaysMeet and require registration.