An article on InsideHigherEd.com entitled, ‘Text Generation‘,  got me started thinking about texting and communicating with students.   Personally, I don’t think in most cases the students should have a teacher’s cell phone number.  However, I think it would be interesting to provide texting options with the ‘library and specificially the ‘reference librarian’ as in the article.  Of course, the article refers to university or college libraries.

Here are some other other thoughts I have about ‘texting’ and students…

As a high school media specialist/librarian I see first person the ‘hold’ that texting has on students.  Cell phones are allowed at school but they are to be turned off and out of sight.  Most student comply when reminded but even the best students need reminding.  Some students will get bent out of shape if you confront them.  I’ve seen students escalate the situation to the point of suspension.  As one teacher said to me, ‘they seem to have a sense of entitlement to them’.

Recently we offered H1N1 vaccinations but few students received them.  It seems the students were texting each other telling about a young women they had seen on TV that had complications.

While much of texting is harmless I suspect that texting is used in negative ways too.   It has been reported that 1 in 6 teens participate in ’sexting’.   I haven’t run across anyone doing that but it is not rare at all to see teens gather around a cell phone laughing and cutting up.  My big concern with ’sexting’ is how easily the stuff could appera on the Internet.

Another misuse that I fear is in the area of drug dealing and gangs.  With 2,500 students and a handful of security associates it would be rather easy to avoid security.

All of this aside, I see potential value of using texting in the role of education but not so much texting each other as in texting to Twitter or something like that.  For example, you could use the ‘Update’ option of Google and show on a Interactive White Board twitters created by the class on the subject matter.  This is how it would look for ‘Shakespeare‘ although you’d want to narrow it down to class responses using a specific #hashtag as shown below.

How it could work:

  • Students would have to have a Twitter account and their cell phones set to text Twitters
  • Students could Twitter responses and include a specific #hashtag such as #shakesp12 or something so that the likelyhood of outsiders participating.  Understand that there is no guarantee here that an outsider might not see the activity and tweet using the same.
  • On the whiteboard you could have the Google updates of #shakesp12 scrolling down the screen.  Of course, there are other applications that would do the same and maybe better.
  • This is just an idea and has not been classroom tested but I think the activity would be engaging to the students.  Of course, not all classes would be mature enough to do this.

What other teaching ideas do you have for using ‘Texting’ or cell phones?