Mobile Phones: School Budget Saver?
Another alternative to clickers is a website called
socrative.com. Socrative is a new player in the education world. Their site allows you to create quizzes,
By John Phillips
In today’s world we all take the cell phones in our pocket for granted. It is common place for us to pull it out on a moment’s notice and look up the latest news or tweet. However, the majority of educators are the same people who confiscate phones from students without even thinking. The devices in their pockets are some of the best tools that teachers can be integrating into instruction. With a few websites and apps, you can turn that annoying buzzing device into a valuable asset for instruction.
How many of you have used a $1500 student response system in your classroom? What would you do with that $1500 if I told you there was a free way to do the same thing? There are web services, such as
PollEverywhere.com, that allow you to poll your students for information, just like a standalone student response system. To use this in your classroom set up a FREE account on the site and then create a question for your students to answer. The site will give you an address for them to text their answers and the results will show up live on your computer.
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polls, and any other response question that can be answered using a smart phone or a computer. The interface is extremely simple to use and the results can be downloaded instantly as an Excel file or emailed to you for later viewing. Socrative also has a student app (for IOS devices) for answering questions, and a teacher app (for IOS devices) for creating quizzes. I personally have used this tool to administer a quiz to all of my students and we really enjoyed the interface. The best part about this tool is that it is continuously updated with new features!
One more idea to save you some money is called remind101. com. Remind101 is a service that allows you to set up classes with a text messaging reminder service at no cost to teachers, and standard text messaging rates for students. Your students sign up for the Remind 101 messaging service, and then you send reminders to them about upcoming assignments, quizzes,
or class happenings. What better way to stay in touch with your students than by sending them text message reminders? You can also share Remind 101 with parents so they can sign up for the reminders as well. The other nice component for teachers is that you can schedule the text messages in advance. In a few keystrokes, you can easily reach your students and parents at anytime with a device that most of them are carrying around at all times.
Cell phones have a place in the classroom. As educators, we have to be willing to use services like those mentioned above to reduce our costs in the budget climate in which we live. Such a powerful device offers us amazing opportunities.
John Phillips teaches Technology and Media Literacy for Battle Creek Public Schools in Battle Creek, MI. He is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. Currently he serves as the Communications Officer for MACUL SIG Elementary Education, and can be found on Twitter as @bcgeek.
SPRING/SUMMER 2012 | MACULJOURNAL
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