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.

Using Student Cell Phones to Prepare for AP Exams

Last year a few of our teachers successfully used Google Voice in some of our World Language Classrooms. They use Google Voice to quickly capture audio recordings of the students speaking in the target language. The use of student cell phones and Google Voice allows the teachers to provide opportunities for students to improve their oral proficiency and creates a forum for the teacher to assess that ability. 

The other day our AP Spanish teacher told me part of the AP exam has a section for a timed audio portion. The problem is most students think they are talking longer than they really are and do not use the full amount of allotted time on the test. Therefore, it is important for the students to practice this skill. Enter Google Voice. The students call the teacher's Google Voice number and leave a recording. The message ends up in the teacher's inbox and is matched to the student's contact information. It also tells how long the recording is. The teacher can listen to the recording, play it back for the student, email the file to the student, save it as an audio file, or send feedback to the student via a text message or an email. If used over and over again the students should get a good feel for how long a 1 or 3 minute conversation is and be better prepared for the audio portion of the AP exam. I think this teacher is making great use of the technology available to her. The process is very quick and can be done from home using a land line phone if a student does not have a cell phone. Below is the information the teacher sent home to parents to get their permission to use the student's cell phone as part of classroom lessons. She included the links to two articles that wrote up what we were doing last year with cell phones.


GOOGLE VOICE:

This year students will be asked to record themselves using Google Voice.  This is a tool for me to easily record and assess student pronunciation and oral communication.  It is free and I can access the recordings through the internet or my phone.  It is completely private and the recordings are sent to my Google Voice account.  Students may use their cell phones or home phones to create these recordings.  I have a separate Google Voice line so no students will be communicating using my private home or cell number.  I am able to text them through the Google Voice number or have the message sent to their email.  This makes feedback easy and accessible.  Students can also hear their own recording if I send it to them so they can listen and make improvements.  This will be a useful tool on days when we will not have access to the lab, or when I ask for a recording for homework.  I used it successfully last year with the support of Administration.  I respectfully ask for your permission to request the cell phone number of your child in order to implement the use of Google Voice recordings.  If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.


Here are two articles featuring our use of Google Voice in the classroom last year:

http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/Google-Voice-Helps-Students-Learn-Spanish.html

http://www.app.com/article/20100225/LIFE/2250306/Teachers-use-technology-to-break-down-language-barriers


NAME OF STUDENT:   ______________________________________

Parent/ Guardian Contact Information:  I would like to have this information so that I can communicate with you about your child’s progress.

 

Parent/Guardian Name: ____________________________________________

Email address: ___________________________________________________

Phone:  Home__________________________________

             Work___________________________________

             Cell ____________________________________

 

Parent/Guardian Name: ____________________________________________

Email address: ___________________________________________________

Phone:  Home__________________________________

             Work___________________________________

             Cell ____________________________________

 

Student email address: _____________________________________________

*Student cell phone number:_________________________________________

*I understand that my child will be using his or her cell phone to create recordings and text messages using Sra. Taylor’s google voice phone number.

Parent Signature ___________________________ Date _______________

 

 

The Perfect Lesson in the Imperfect Sense

I observed a lesson the other day in a Spanish 2 class. The lesson dealt with using the imperfect tense i.e. describing activities that one used to do in the past. Each student first had to pick two slips of paper - one with an activity on it, the other with a classmate's name on it. They then had to draw a picture of the classmate doing the activity. Using their cell phone, the students then called into the teacher's Google Voice account and described what the classmate used to do using the imperfect tense. The students, a few at a time, went out into the hallway to place the calls. Afterwards they turned in their drawings which the teacher numbered. While the students were drawing their pictures the teacher had Spanish music videos playing through her LCD projector on the front screen. The songs contained vocabulary words the students were currently learning and primarily used the imperfect tense. The next day in class the teacher played each call to the class. The students had to listen to the call and decide which picture the call was describing. If they guessed correctly the student then had to further add to the description using another original sentence in either the imperfect or the preterite, which they had studied earlier in the year. Correct answers were tallied and winners received homework passes. During day one of the lesson I asked the teacher how she would have done the audio recordings without the cell phones and she responded by saying she would not have been able to do the lesson. After thinking for a while she said she could have used digital recorders but would have had to download each file from the recorders in order to play them back to the students, which would have made it a much more time consuming process.

The take away from the lesson was that the students were immersed in the target language. They heard the language spoken by the teacher, classmates, and in the music videos. Additionally, the students had to write and speak in the target language. I must add that the teacher is an experienced teacher who utilizes technology and these types of activities on a regular basis so the students are used to it. It was a very creative lesson. The use of student cell phones with Google Voice blended very naturally into the lesson.

I want to thank Ms. Peters for her assistance in writing this post. You can click here to go to her webpage.

Do your students understand the lesson? Get instant feedback with text messaging!

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.

 

Cell Phone Centric Classrooms

I observed a Spanish teacher using student cell phones with Google Voice as part of the lesson. You can read about it here. After the lesson we discussed ways to increase opportunities for students to engage with the target language. Below were suggestions I sent to her after thinking about it for a day or two.

Listen and respond to voice mail message

Leave a voice mail greeting in Spanish on your Google Voice account that asks the students to respond to something you say in the greeting. The students just speak after the greeting and it is recorded as a voicemail. This could be done in class or for homework.

Listen to Google Voice greeting and write down responses
Students call your Google Voice number and listen to the greeting. The greeting would require them to write something down. This could be done in class or for homework. They could email or text you the answers

Students calling students
Have a sheet with students phone numbers on it. The phone numbers would be numbered 1- 25 (or how many students you have in class). Then tell student #1 to call student #7. You could have the arrangements set up in advance. Give the students a list of things to talk about. You could have one of the students call you. This could be used as a quick activity during class - possibly a Do Now.

Students texting students
Using the same scenario as above you could have students text Spanish sentences or responses to each other. This would give them the opportunity to write in Spanish.

Students texting Google Voice
Have students text responses or answers to your Google Voice number to be evaluated.

Text messaging to a central location
Handout a worksheet with some vocabulary words or writing prompts and have the students create sentences in Spanish. The students  would then text their sentences to Wiffiti. The responses would be anonymous and could be projected onto a screen using an LCD projector. The students could then critique each response. The same scenario could be done using Poll EveryWhere or Twitter. 

What other ideas do you have?

Students on their cell phones in the hallway, what was going on in this classroom?

Google_voice
I observed a class the other day and I observed students talking on their cell phones in the hallway, other groups of students sitting at their desks and talking, and later on a popular music video was projected onto the large screen in the front of the room. Some administrators might have been bothered by what I saw, but I thought it was one of the best lessons I had seen all year. Why? The students were fully engaged in the learning. Let me explain.
 
The class I observed was a high school Spanish class. The day before the lesson I observed the students began writing a dialogue between two or three people in Spanish using the vocabulary words they were learning as part of the unit. They continued this activity and began practicing speaking the dialogue. When the students felt ready to record their conversation they went into the hallway and using their cell phone they called the teacher's Google Voice number. Each group's dialogue was stored in the teacher's Google Voice inbox. Since she has each student's contact info in her Google Voice account it associates a phone number and the student's email to each student recording. At the beginning of the lesson the teacher went over the rubric she would be using to grade the recordings. She emphasized that she would be listening to their voice and that they should try to sound like a native speaker. When the students completed the recording she played a Spanish music video. She handed out the lyrics in Spanish with some of the words missing. The students had to listen and fill in the blanks. The next time through the video she supplied a word bank to assist students who were having trouble.

After the lesson the teacher said to me she was sorry that I did not get to see her doing that much. I told her it was one of the best lessons I had seen all year. I think she was somewhat surprised by my statement, but I reiterated to her that for almost the entire period the students were either reading, writing, listening to, or speaking Spanish. The NJ Core Curriculum Standard for World Languages emphasizes the ability for students to communicate in the target language. I must add that this particular teacher is excellent at what she does. She works very hard and has developed an excellent rapport with the students in her classroom. There was absolutely no misuse of the student cell phones. The students were very well behaved.

As a side note our Spring Break was to start in a day and the teacher was going away with her family. She has a smartphone running the Android operating system. Google Voice is a native app on her phone. If she wanted, while she was sitting on the beach, she could listen to the student recordings and send an email or text message to each student letting them know how they sounded. She could have even sent a copy of the recordings to each of the students for them to listen to (For non-Android phones you can access Google Voice via the web). Without Google Voice and student cell phones how would you duplicate this lesson? What would it cost the district? How much time would it take? Would you be able to archive the recordings and share them with the students?

Additional side notes - For this lesson the cell phones worked exactly as they should. The students had no problem using their own phone and at no time did they use the school network. Easy to use and no glitches. How often can you say this about classroom technology.

How do you record student conversations at your school?

Does structured use of cellphones reduce the irresponsible uses of cellphones at other times?

Paul Barnwell makes some compelling points and raises good questions regarding the use of cellphones in classrooms. In a recent article he wrote for Education Week he states:
There are responsible ways to incorporate cellphone use into classrooms, and we may be doing students a disservice by allowing draconian anti-cellphone policies to persist in schools.
This has been the experience at our school. Some of our teachers use student cellphones and Google Voice to record and assess students speaking in the target language in our world language classrooms. How do you record and assess world language students at your school?

Further on in the article Mr. Barnwell said the following:
There are other questions thoughtful school leadership teams should consider. Incorporating laptops or other technologies into a classroom can be time-consuming and frustrating, for example. At my middle school, we have a wireless network with mobile laptop carts. But the computers are fast becoming outdated, and the boot time is painfully slow on some machines. For a student with a cellphone, however, the time to “boot up” and retrieve, create, or share information is comparatively minuscule. This could be a major advantage for teachers wanting to incorporate quick Web searches, collaboration, or idea sharing, and it also lessens the pressure on school wireless-network infrastructures.
Cell phones and iPods boot up almost instantly. One of the takeaways our teachers learned from using student cellphones in the classroom was how quickly they were able to record each student speaking in the target language. This left more time for instruction, amongst other things.

Students live in the world of texting. If you want to reach them texting is the best option. Barnwell address that in the following:

How cool would it be if school announcements were sent to students on their phones? Or, instead of using a blaring PA system, the main office could text a student to come and pick up the lunch he or she forgot on the counter at home? Or perhaps students could openly record cellphone video of teachers for test-review purposes. Or teachers could send texted reminders to students about homework assignments.

I use Outlook to send text message reminders to students who have a detention. If a student misses a detention they have it doubled. To avoid this I send the students a reminder between the last two periods of the day. The students love it and it has cut down on the number of students who miss detentions. I use the Delayed Delivery option in Outlook to set this up.

Finally Barnwell states the following:

Opponents of this type of innovative approach are likely to bring up the potential distractions and abuses that cellphones in school can certainly create, like covert and sneaky text or picture messaging between friends. But guess what? We did the same thing back in our day, writing notes to our friends on actual paper. Inappropriate communication in school will never cease. I expect, however, that structured use of cellphones in my classroom would reduce the temptation to use them in irresponsible ways.

All kinds of things cause disruptions in classrooms everyday. Pencils and paper cause distractions but we don't ban them. In my opinion Barnwell makes his best statement when he says, "...that structured use of cellphones in my classroom would reduce the temptation to use them in irresponsible ways." That has been our experience here at the school where I work. I posted about this a while back. In the first half of this year we saw a decrease in the number of cellphone violations compared to last year when we did not allow students to use their cell phones at all during the school day. Students have told me that by allowing them to use their cellphones between classes and during lunch it decreases the temptation to use their cellphone at other inappropriate times.

Follow the link above to read the full article. Paul Barnwell has a blog titled Questions for Schools .

Using Google Voice in a World Language Classroom

 
App_-_language
 
This article in the Asbury Park Press talks about world Language teachers using Google Voice in their language classes to record students speaking in the target language.
 
The picture above and the quotes below are from the article:

Another form of technology that Peters and Taylor have taken advantage of is Google Voice. With this particular concept, students use their cell phones to call their teacher's Google Voice number and discuss a topic in Spanish.

Kevin Bals, the supervisor for World Language and the school's assistant principal, says this is a way to "capture, record and share audio files."

Bals believes Google Voice has many advantages. According to Bals, teachers are able to listen to and grade the recordings at their leisure and unlike an oral presentation students do not have to speak in front of a class.

"I'm enjoying Google Voice," says Taylor. "I think it can do the most for us."

Freshman Priya Angara, 14, says the class is "Exciting and the technology makes it more interesting."

Jessica Chen, 15, a freshman, is another student in Taylor's class and enjoys the technological benefits of Google Voice.

"It's a tool where you call in and it records our conversation and she (Taylor) grades it,"Jessica says.

Another advantage of Google Voice is that students are able listen to themselves speaking in Spanish. This is just one of many technological tools used by Taylor and Peters.

These world language teachers are using student cell phones to call into Google Voice and record messeges in the target language as part of in-class activities. Using Google Voice allows these teachers to very quickly capture audio recording from each student in a single location. The teachers can then listen to and assess each student's speaking ability. The teachers can email these recordings to the individual students so that they can listen to them. The Google Voice accounts are free and the students only use their cell phones for a couple of minutes so the cost is minimal. Most students have unlimited voice minutes and that reduces the cost to zero. For students that do not have cell phones the teachers will let the students use their phone or the students will borrow one of their classmates phones. In this post I wrote about another teacher who is using Google Voice in a world Language classroom. Using Google Voice and student cell phones is a very cost effective way to record student's speaking in the target language and can be done very quickly so as to minimize the impact on instructional time.

Update: Converge Magazine did a short article on this topic.

Cell Phones & Google Voice in a World Language Classroom - Perfect Together!

There is a great article in the December issue of Educause about using cell phones in a World Language classroom. The writer talks about using Google Voice as the tool to capture student recordings. I have a Google Voice account and I never thought of using it this way. I supervise the World Language Department at the high school where I work. There are teachers in my world language department who are using cell phones as an instructional tool but they are using different platforms to capture the student recordings. 

Follow the link above to read the full article. Below are the key takeaways listed at the beginning of the article:
  • To pursue a paradigm shift in education with limited finances, schools should consider taking advantage of ubiquitous cell phone technology for pedagogical purposes that square with best practices within appropriate disciplines.
  • New Internet SMS and messaging services are proving especially useful to language teachers, turning the focus away from the particulars of language and writing and toward whole language oral output and pronunciation, even at the beginner level.
  • Cell phones give faculty access to students both in and out of the classroom, providing greater power to instruct, persuade, cajole, encourage, motivate, and engage.
  • Students who record their voices in computer language labs or using cell phones become more engaged and invested in those potentially public recordings.
Peyton Jobe, the author of the article, elaborates on how students invest more time for an activity if they know it is going to be recorded. She states:
It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.

This is a key observation Jobes makes. She backs up her statements by the results of an informal survey she conducted on the students in one of her classes. I know the few times teachers in my school have used student cell phones to capture student recordings they have had very positive experiences.The article is well written and worth your time to read it in it's entirety.


via Liz Kolb from CellPhonesInLearning