Thanks to Ben Wilkoff for sharing how he has used Textmarks and Text the Mob with some students in his school district. Textmarks is a service I was familiar with but never really understood how it all worked. Ben helped clear that up. You can use Textmarks to create a distribution list to send out alerts via text messages, it can be used for collaboration amongst a group of students, a coach could use it to contact all the team members about upcoming events, or a teacher could use it to keep track of a group of students on a field trip. Ben used it to conduct a scavenger hunt for over 100 students in downtown Denver. The scavenger hunt was designed to have the students learn the history of Denver while playing the game. Textmarks uses SMS messages to communicate and is free. Follow the link for more details.

Text the Mob is similar to Poll Everywhere. You can use it to assess understanding with a classroom full of students, or use it conduct back-channel conversations. It seems to be more generous it what it allows users to do for free than Poll Everywhere. It does provide real time polling updates. Earlier this year I used Poll Everywhere to conduct a quick survey during one of our faculty meetings. It worked very well. I plan on using Text the Mob the next time I conduct a survey to see how it performs.