Living in the 4th Screen

Exploring the use of mobile technology in education and life

Free Resources for Teachers to communicate with students or parents and never give out your personal cell phone number

Below are some resources to help you use email or text messages to communicate with your students. These services work for class assignment reminders, communicating with students on a class trip, updating the members (and parents) of a sports team about a change in practice, and so on and so forth.


Remind101_logo
 Remind 101 is a free service you can use to set up text or email reminders for when assignments are due. As a teacher you create an account and then set up classes. The students can then log in and set up what kind of reminders they want to receive (text, email, or both). You can set reminders up in advance or as you go along through the semester. Parents can even create an account and choose to get the reminders.


Cel.ly is a new mass text messaging
service that says they are interested in schools using their free service! You can get started by texting "start" to 23559. Cel.ly will then ask you for a login and password. You can then go to the website Cel.ly, login and set up text message channels. Each channel is set up with a keyword so that students, teachers, community members, and parents can join your mass text message with a keyword from their cell phone! There does not seem to be a limit on the number of people that can join your mass alert. Cel.ly also gives you three choices in how you want to set up the mass text alerts. You can have all members send messages back and forth to the whole group. You can have only the teacher (owner of the channel) send messages to the group. You can have the group members send messages back to the teacher only! In addition your texting channel can be public or private! All messages are archived in Cel.ly! You can send messages via the Cel.ly website or via phone. It works quickly and easily!

Pulse.to is similar to Cel.ly. You can login to the website, create a free account and then you start to set up pulses. You can have a public or private mass texting channel (called "pulses"). In addition, you can select if only the pulse owner can send messages or if everyone in the group can send messages. Pulse.to works in many different countries besides the US and Canada! In addition there is not a short code to join, rather students/teachers/parents can text in to a real phone number (so phones that don't work with short codes or keywords will still work with this service!).

Voice_logo
 Google Voice is a free service from Google that allows you to get a phone number that you can use to ring all of you phones. Sign up for a free account and you can use it for the services listed above with your students. This way you never have to give out your cell phone number to students. You give them your Google Voice number. You can set the Google Voice number to ring whatever phone you want to. You can have voice mails go to your email account, your cell phone, home phone, your neighbor's phone, or any phone you choose. It can even ring all those phones at once if you want. You can set up the number to send you a text message when you get a new call. You can give out the number and use it for text messaging as well. Using Google Voice with the one of the services mentioned above allows you to communicate with your students without ever giving out your personal phone number.

Thanks to Liz Kolb (@lkolb) for most of this information.