This post on the Mobile Learner blog talks about ways to get instant feedback from students during a lesson. The following is from the article:

This is where the text message comes in.  Text messaging has the advantage of being a private way for students to provide feedback.  It allows for an instructional correspondence to take place and allows the teacher to know who is understanding the material and who is not. Of course, teacher may be very uncomfortable sharing their phone number with students and this is a very legitimate concern.  This is where services such as Polleverywhere come in.  This pay-service allows teacher to poll students using text messaging to an intermediary so that neither the teacher nor the student has to share their personal information with each other.

I think this is a great idea. I basically said the same thing last week in my Cell Phone Centric Classroom post, though I recommended using Google Voice. Using Google Voice a teacher does not have to give their cell phone number to the students, so it keeps their personal number private. Follow the link above to read the entire article.

This past week one of the teachers in our World Language Department used student cell phones and ipadio to record pairs of students having a conversation about a famous Mexican painting. Prior to the activity the teacher paired the students off and had them write a dialog in Spanish talking about the Mexican painting. On the day of the activity the students paired off around the room and using one cell phone dialed into ipadio, entered the 4-digit access code, and began talking. When they were finished they just hung up the phone. Each of the recordings were saved in the teachers private ipadio account. Later that day the teacher listened to the conversations and assessed each student's performance.

After the class when I spoke with the teacher she told me that she had the students do the recording in groups at a time so that she did not have 20+ students talking at once. She said that doing the phone calls took less time than she planned. She had about 20 recordings and all but two worked as planned. One recording was nothing but static and the other one was just not that clear. The next day she had those students redo the activity.

The lesson required the students to study the culture of Mexico (painting), use correct grammar in writing the script, and use proper pronunciation in speaking the target language. Additionally, the activity afforded the students the opportunity to perform an oral activity with just one of their peers while talking on a cell phone (something they are quite comfortable with) as opposed to doing it in front of the whole class. The take away for the teacher was that she could listen to the recordings at her leisure and replay the conversations as much as needed to properly assess the student's performance. This scenario is much better than when the teacher has to assess the students live when they perform in front of the class. In the live scenario the teacher has to asses both students at the same time and does not have the option to replay the conversation.The end result is a much better assessment of the students speaking ability. The teacher can provide much richer feedback and even replay the recording for the student. The students enjoyed the activity and were eager to listen to themselves speaking.

I believe this activity demonstrates an innovative way to use student cell phones within the confines of the classroom and is an example of technology being used to accomplish something that would not be possible without the technology. Did I mention that the activity used none of the schools technology resources?

A big thank you to Liz Kolb for sharing about ipadio on her podcast and to James O'Malley from ipadio for setting up the "open channel" to make the multiple phone calls possible. Thank you also to the brave teacher in our world language department who was willing to use student cell phones in the classroom.