Text messaging in your teaching

Note: Please welcome this guest post by Scott Morrison – Instructional Designer at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.

The Site 2009 conference in Charleston South Carolina was a real awakening for me. During this session I saw several themes emerge and was presented with some very practical information. My sense from the conference was that we have entered an era where the speed at which we can collect, or in the case of the educator, give information is what will lead to our success. Specifically I mean we are not in an age where cell phones are new technology and we train and then deploy new ideas. During a round table discussion Kevin Thomas, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Annsley Thornton School of Education, drove this point home when he discussed how he uses cell phones in teaching.

Cell phones are not new technology to the average North American high school or college/university student. They use them frequently and well. Further, they often carry them with them at all times. This presents a unique opportunity for us to quickly and easily interact with our learners. Instead of placing content, notices, or updates on an LMS and hoping that your students find it in time, it is possible to email that material in the form of a text message to your learners. The benefit is that they have the information instantly, it is portable, and it is easy for educators to deploy. Also, the learner doesn’t have to go and seek this information and it saves them time. As was hinted at during the conference LMS (Learning Management System) may be going the way of the dodo bird. Although I don’t necessarily think that will happen anyway time soon, I do see this being a useful tool that isn’t bound within the constraints of the LMS.

To do this create a distribution list for the students in your class using their cellphone numbers and providers. For those that do not have cell phones simply collect email addresses. To enter the phone to text address in your email client consult the service provider's website. For example:

10didigitphonenumberhere@pcs.rogers.com
10digitphonenumberhere@msg.telus.com

Keep in mind that your messages can only be 180 characters long. Thanks to Kevin Thomas for his wonderful idea and Eric Tremblay for suggesting we share it here.

If you have used text messaging in your teaching, please share some examples of the types of messages you send to your students by leaving a comment below.

Image credit: here.

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Live classroom polling without clickers?

Almost everybody these days has a cellphone - especially students! So a company called Poll Everywhere has decided to deploy an Audience Response System (aka, clickers) by using text messaging on a cellphone instead of a wireless clicker transmitter. A colleague of mine (thanks Katia!) first let me know about this company by a comment she left on one of my blog posts. Today I spent some time trying it out and my initial assessment is that this is GREAT! It really works.

• It's fast. When I send a txt msg it takes about 2-3 seconds for the vote to be captured in the resulting graph


• It's easy for students to participate. As easy as sending a conventional text message and they do not have to buy a 'clicker' they can use their personal cell phone.


• It's easy for instructors. No longer must the presentation room be equipped with a receiver to capture the signal from the clickers. All you need is an internet connection to capture the data from the live graph.


• You can embed the 'live' graph as a PowerPoint slide into your classroom presentation. No need to minimize PowerPoint to go to a website to view the results.


• It's cheap! In fact, you can try it for free with a maximum of 30 votes per question. For larger numbers of votes you can subscribe to the system for a monthly fee.


• Web-voting is enabled. If you have students without a cellphone but with a laptop... then they can still vote by going to a specific link the instructor provides.

Want to try it? Here's a poll that I created below


Try it! Vote! If you want to vote by cell phone then here's how to do it:

1. As the poll says, write a text message to this number: 32075 (Note: this is a text message short code - it is used like a telephone number for text messages.)


2. In the text message you will place your vote. The format of your text message is specific: "Cast xxxxx". Where 'xxxxx' is a unique number associated with the option you wish to vote for.


3. For example, in this poll, if you want to vote for Desire2Learn then write a text message to 32075 which contains this text "cast 29368". 2-3 seconds later you will see the graph change to incorporate your result. Note: Once 30 votes are tallied the poll closes so I will try to reset this poll once in awhile so that people can continue to try it.

Note: Poll Everywhere only works in some countries. Check their list.

If you want to try the web-based voting, then you can vote here.

I think this is great and I am definitely going to use it in class. What do you think?

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Teaching with cellphones impacts learning?

Note: This is a follow-up message to an item posted to eLearning Acupuncture a week ago (19 Nov 2008), so be sure to read the original post first before reading this post.

I left off in the last post with the intention of testing if the use of cellphones in teaching contributed positively towards student learning. So here’s the simple experiment I designed.

First, a week after I exposed the class to the cellphone exercise in trying to answer the question “what is the mechanism of action of cyanide’s toxicity” via text message, I posed them the same question again. Only this time, they could not use their cellphones – they had to personally know the answer at that moment. The result is that four people out of 24 students answered the question correctly.

I approached these four people to ask the follow-up question: “Where and when did you learn this fact about cyanide?” Of the four people who answered the question correctly, two of them were the students who had successfully completed the cellphone activity last week, one was someone who independently looked up the answer because of her exposure to the question in last week’s cellphone activity, and the last person was someone who knew the answer from a previous course.

So here is how I interpret this data in combination with last week cellphone data.

First, let’s examine the people who successfully accomplished the cellphone task last week and let’s see if their accomplishment from last week affected their learning. Of the two students who accomplished the cellphone task last week both were able to correctly answer the question regarding the mechanism of action of cyanide one week later. Both students identified the previous week’s cellphone activity as being the time and method that they learned this answer. So for 100% of these students, success with the previous week’s cellphone activity did indeed contribute positively to their learning. They demonstrated this by retaining this knowledge for the period of at least one week.

Second, let’s examine the student who did not successfully complete the previous week’s cellphone activity yet was stimulated by the activity to a great enough extent where she independently researched the answer and was able to demonstrate her knowledge one week later. Did the cellphone activity affect her learning? YES! On the surface this sounds quite positive doesn’t it? However, there were 19 other people in the class who where not stimulated by the activity to a great enough extent to independently research the answer as she had. So for 1 out of 20 (or 5%) the activity stimulated their learning despite being unsuccessful with the cellphone activity. For the other 95%, there was no positive impact.

Third, the student who previously knew about the mechanism of action of cyanide was unaffected by the activity – he already knew the answer.

So taken together, despite a very small sample size, there is a suggestion that cellphone use in the classroom might positively affect learning. Maybe just enough of a suggestion that further investigation on the subject is warranted. What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

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