Mobile Learning Blog

The whole world is talking about Twitter, so this post is probably nothing new to some. Most people get that you can post a short message about what you are doing, and anyone who follows you on Twitter will be able to see the message. I follow you, I see your messages. You follow me, you see mine. But many people still don’t understand how it works beyond that. For instance, many aren’t aware that you can have selective tweeters’ tweets delivered directly to your cell phone via text message. And you can reply back to Twitter via text message. Once you and your students are signed up and properly set up, the whole process can be conducted via cell phone text messaging, making the whole process mobile and not tied to a web page on a computer.

Another little known secret to novice Twitter users is that Twitter is connected to everything. I can update my Google calendar and ToDo tasks via Twitter, and I can set it up so Twitter will broadcast my blog posts from my blog to Twitter with a link sending people back to my blog to read the post. Think announcements for students with that one. It’s also connected with a very nice polling site, Poll Everywhere, that lets your respondents vote in your polls via Twitter. Twitter makes their API available so any company can develop tools that will work through Twitter. There are so many more, but in the following movie I focus on the first tool mentioned above. In subsequent posts I’ll show you the other tips. Have a look.

Using Text Messaging with Twitter from soul4real on Vimeo.

Part II of III tips for using Twitter in the classroom. Part I covers using Twitter via text messaging on your cell phone.
One of the things I forgot to mention is once you get your cell phone set up to receive text messages from Twitter, you can post a tweet by sending it to 40404 from your phone.

I think my cell phone, or more aptly, my Blackberry is attached to my body. It’s the one thing I have with me 24-7. Yes, I practically sleep with it. And no, the person on the other side of the bed doesn’t think too kindly of my Blackberry beeping in the middle of the night. But I can’t help it. I feel disconnected without it. It’s my connection to the outside world.

I was wondering if others felt the same way about their cell phones as I do. Mostly I wondered about my students. People are always saying that our students are tech savvy, digital natives, socially connected on the web. Well, I don’t see it. In my online class this summer, only half of my students gave me a cell phone number when I asked for one. Is it possible they don’t all have cell phones? And when I introduced the TextMarks widget to them on the course blog, not one was interested. However, I just discovered I have two subscribers! Yeah!

A TextMark is a keyword you select that people can text message to 41411 and receive a custom response from you. Users can also subscribe to your TextMark to get updates and alerts.

Below is an example of the widget:

The widget allows for people to type in their cellphone to subscribe to my TextMark. The widget also shows the latest update. The way I’d planned to use text messaging in this class was a way to update students 1-2 daily about new posts to the class blog and other class announcements. For instance, we just had a horrible start to our summer session because Blackboard was not working properly. Students couldn’t get in to see what was going on in the class. To keep students on task, I started putting content on the course blog. Once I got a good chunk of stuff on there, I’d add a TextMark alert saying it was now available on the blog. I also sent a TextMark alert saying when Bb was going down and when it was going to back up.

Another good use for this service is to alert students to a particularly good discussion that could use some more input. And if students are subscribed, how can they forget about your class when they’re getting daily texts? Just one or two; I don’t want to be annoying.