Text Messaging Your Students!

There.  That title should get your attention.  In my last post I promised to review ClassParrot, however, I’m going to break my promise.  ClassParrot couldn’t find a business model that worked and went out of business.  But, their idea was that teachers could increase communication with students and parents through safe and secure texting and I believe they are right on the money about that—well maybe not “money”—how about they were on the “mark”.  ClassParrot would give teachers a certain number of text messages per month, for free, and then charge teachers who wanted unlimited texting.  Perhaps that didn’t work for them because a number of other sites are willing to provide unlimited texting for free.  So, allow me to review three of those sites instead.  Even after going out of business, the ClassParrot site still provides this bit of information—only 22% of Emails get opened, whereas 98% of text messages get opened—now which would you say is a better way to reach students?

 

Here is a quote from a blog by Anna Otto (which you can read in its entirety here):

There are several web-based texting sites that allow you to text students while avoiding the legal risk of exchanging personal contact information with them. You won’t know your students’ cell phone numbers, and they won’t know yours. All of these types of sites let you send messages through their website, some also let you text straight from your phone. They’re great if you’d like to help students remember to study for an upcoming test, remind them to bring in certain supplies, let them know about date and time changes for club/athletic events, and more!

 

Not only am I too cheap to have a smart phone, but, believe it or not, I have texting blocked on my feature phone—I mean I am really a skin flint.  So, perhaps I’m not the best one to be doing this review.  But, here goes….

 

Celly (http://cel.ly/) – as in cell — a cell could be your first block Biology Class, the athletes on a football team, a study group, or the kids going on a particular field trip.  Celly seems to be a wonderful vehicle for organizing protests—it has been used a lot by the occupy Wall Street movement.  I’m not sure how it works or looks on a phone, but, if students go to the Celly website they’ll find they have opportunity to open their own cells or to join up or drop in on hundreds of other cells—not just Occupy Wall Street, but lots of Occupy sites seem  to show up.  This makes the point that you can set up as many cells (or classes) as you like.  You can join Celly and set up cells either on your computer or on your phone—oh, they also have an Android App (no iPad app at this point.)  The easiest way to have students join your cell is to have them send the text “join” to the group and enter the correct code.  You can set up cells: 1) that anyone can join, or 2) anyone who provides a description of themselves of which you approve, or 3) only those who know the password can join.   Once they are in, you do not see their phone number and they do not see yours. 

 

You can then send out group texts from your computer for free.  On your phone, standard text messaging rates apply—but a group text counts as just one text. 

 

Being the cell administrator gives you several options.  You can set things up so:  1) you can text the students but, they cannot reply, or 2) so that they can reply, or 3) so that students also may send out texts to the whole group, or 4) so that students can send out texts “curated” by you to the whole group (meaning if it makes it past your one teacher censorship board it is sent to the group – similar to moderating a blog).  If a student replies to a text with a question, the teacher can then answer that question privately.   Standard messaging rates apply for the students, so you might want to get parental permission for this one.  For those students who may be as frugal as I am and therefore, don’t have texting, replies can also be made through Email. 

 

Of the sites I’m reviewing today, this is the only one where a student can respond to a multiple choice poll and have the answers appear on your website—to be projected on a screen—no, wait, we can’t do that in school—but, the capacity is there.   To assure that your students get plenty of sleep you can shut down the reply capability every night at bedtime.  Celly also allows you to add “hashtags” to texts so that they can be easily filtered and sorted.  Finally, with Celly you can create messages and schedule them to be sent later.

 

Remind 101 (https://www.remind101.com/).  This site is supposed to be the elegantly simple one, and in many ways it is.  You add a class and it creates joining instructions in PDF format which can immediately be printed and distributed.  However, I tried to join a group I created via Email (to see how it worked) and Thunderbird told me my message was not deliverable.   Furthermore, when I tried to schedule a message to be delivered later—something didn’t pop up on my screen allowing me to do so.   To sign up via Email, one needs an Email address.  Remind 101 does have an iPhone/iPad app.

 

Class Pager (https://www.classpager.com/) – this looks and acts a lot like Remind 101—I don’t know which came first, but, one of them obviously viewed the other’s site.  The advantages of Class Pager over Remind—you can set up polls (but not multiple choice ones) and you can respond to students individually.  The disadvantages are that you can only set up one class for free—their business model charges $10/month per additional class and students can’t join via Email—they must have texting to join.

 

In conclusion, if I were to select one of them, it would be Celly.  I’ll grant you it is not as simple to use as the others; however, it seems to work best with my machine, with our filters, and with my restrictions (no Smart phone, etc.)  Now, would I really use it in a classroom?  As a coach or sponsor of an extracurricular activity, I’d definitely use it—after clearing it with my principal first.  As a classroom teacher, I think I’d give it a try, restrict its use to very limited occasions, and see how the students and parents react.  If communication with parents and students is key to classroom success, how can it hurt to try it out?

Today's Meet

On the afternoon of March 14th I attended an EdTech session entitled “High Tech History”  conducted by Aaron Dodge a middle school social studies teacher, and Jennifer Richardson an ITRT, both of Charles City. As it turns out, the websites are ones which Aaron has used in his history class, but, aren't at all specific to history.

I don’t have a lot of notes from the session, but, here are some brief remarks on some of the websites they mentioned.

First on the list is Today’s Meet, which was discribed as similar to Twitter. Today’s meet is an elegantly simple site…with some drawbacks. It is premised on the supposition that there is backchannel discussion” going on in your classroom. A backchannel discussion is “everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter”—things like; “What are your doing after school tonight?” Here is a quote from their website:

“The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give you the most immediate feedback you'll ever get.
Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.
Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.”

You simply go to the site, create a “room” and decide how long you want it to be active—from a couple of hours to a year. Once the room is created, you have a short URL which anyone can go to and contribute to the discussion. If someone wants to contribute to the discussion, they type in their name and a message (of 140 characters or less), and click on “say” The message then appears on the screen of anyone else who is at that website. The obvious drawback is that the teacher cannot moderate the discussion. In fact, the creator of the class room is at the same level as everyone else, they can contribute messages, but so can anyone. Any student could make up a bogus name and enter a distracting, disruptive, or obscene remark.

The teacher can switch to a “projector” mode showing only the discussion …or on “transcript” and get a printable copy of the discussion.

The next website they mentioned was Edmodo.com. After writing the draft for the text above, I spent a couple of hours investigating Edmodo. I’m really excited about Edmodo and want to give it its own posting, so I’ll save that for just a bit.

The ITRTs of ACPS were already well aware of a couple of additional
sites mentioned in the session:

GoAnimate—for making animated videos. We’ll have to do some future blogs on all the sites similar to this one.

Blabberize--for producing talking, embeddable avatars from photos. That is, taking a photo of someone’s face, uploading it, and making the mouth move up and down as a voice (yours or a digitally produced one) speaks from a script you’ve written.

Vocaroo--"The premier voice recording service"  At this site, in theory, you can click and record a message (our firewall seems to prevent this from working at school) or upload a message you recorded on your laptop recorder (this worked).  A link is then generated which displays a media player that will play back the recording.  Embed code is also produced allowing  you to post the player in a webpage.  There are also sharing options tailored to twitter, facebook, wordpress, etc.

That’s it for this entry, but, I promise, it won’t be long before I create another post dealing with Edmodo.