Living in the 4th Screen

Exploring the use of mobile technology in education and life

The New and Improved Remind101: Drop dead easy text messaging service for students

Remind101_text_messaging_for_t

Remind101 has been updated and it is easy as ever to send text message reminders to your students. Don't worry, students never see your mobile phone number and your never see theirs. Students live in the text message world. The rarely if ever use email. If you want to get a message to your students send them a text. Remind101 makes this possible. Oh, by the way, it is free.

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.

Use Your iPhone 4 for Science with Mini Microscope

via GottaBeMobile by Chuong Nguyen on 3/31/11

Mini Microscope is an attachment for the iPhone 4 that will allow you to use your Apple smartphone to conduct science experiments. The attachment comes with a 60X zoom lens and dual-LED lights to turn your iPhone 4 into a mini microscope that can come in handy for those who are working in the field.

At a recent Nokia Musings technology panel in Silicon Valley, Nokia had invited researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley to talk about the intersection of technology and humanity. Those researchers, who used Nokia smartphones and outfit those devices with their own custom lens solutions to create their own mini microscopes, say that the quality of their miniature microscopes are almost as good as more expensive and bulkier systems in the lab, but are a lot cheaper and more portable. With mobile labs enabled by high-powered smartphones scientists can rapidly obtain results without having to send their data to a lab, which can save time and resources.

If the iPhone 4′s kit offers similar results as the Nokia solutions, this may help field researchers and scientists in remote areas obtain, gather, and analyze data relatively inexpensively. Unlike the custom Nokia solutions that research scientists had to create, the iPhone 4 kits are commercialized, similar to telescopic lens solutions for a faux DSLR experience on an iPhone, and can be obtained for £29.99,

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.

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?

Twitter in the Classroom?

Below is a video about a University of Texas professor using Twitter as part of classroom discussions. Using their cell phones or computers students can post to Twitter and the professor has these responses projected onto a screen in the front of the room. Nowhere in the video does it discuss the interaction between the live in-class lecture and the Twitter posts.

I like the idea that students can post to Twitter, as this probably provides a forum for shy students to provide some input into the class discussion (A point brought out by a few of the students in the video). I also thought it was interesting how the professor participated in one of the classroom lectures via Twitter when she was out of town. The TA led the class but the professor engaged the students in her Twitter posts. That is a nice use of technology.

At the same time I find the 140 character limit of Twitter to be frustrating. The limit makes me feel like I am having a bunch of conversations that get cut off midway through the discussion. Maybe I will feel differently in time as I just started using Twitter with any regularity. I do like the real time nature of Twitter (Last night's updates on the Chile earthquake where way ahead of the mainstream media). I find the hash tags (#) and @ symbols mixed within posts to be frustrating. I have a programming background and understand characters and such, but what about the non-geek world? Can we come up with a Twitter-like experience that is real time, but allows more characters and eliminates these ( #@!&) symbols in the post?

Does Twitter or any real-time feed have a place in education?

 

Education Apps by Curriculum Areas

Click here to see a list of apps to use on your iPhone/iPod Touch created by Cheryl Davis and Acalanes Union High School District. The list of apps is broken down by curriculum areas. The list is comprehensive and provides an iTunes link to each application. There are currently 172 apps listed.

via I Education Apps Review

Apple catching RIM in the Smartphone Race

CNET News reported that Apple has closed the gap with Research In Motion (RIM) in the percentage of market share amongst smartphone owners.

RIM holds a 40% share to Apple's 30%. Those numbers represent a 1% decline for RIM and a 5% increase for Apple.

Overall smartphone ownership is up significantly. Below is a quote from the CNET article:

When including all manufacturers, the smartphone market is clearly gaining momentum. ChangeWave reports that 39 percent of those polled in September now own a smartphone, an increase of 2 percentage points since June, but more importantly, double the ownership of consumers polled two years ago.

I believe this trend will continue and that you will see this kind of growth amongst our high school population. If I am correct what kind of implications does this have for our schools?