My pal, Keith Kostek, emailed me the other day about an interesting new idea called Remind101.com. The premise is that with parental permission, a teacher can send text messages to an entire class. For example, a teacher can update a homework assignment or remind students of an important deadline. The key to this is that the teacher doesn’t get to see the student cell #’s nor can the students see that of the teacher. It works with cell phones and with email accounts. The only caution I have is that teachers are diligent in collecting permission from parents first.
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The URL: http://remind101.com/
9:51 am
Hi Pete,
This is similar to an interesting twitter feature. If you have a twitter account (say @teacher is your user name) then anybody, regardless of whether they have a twitter account can subscribe to your tweets.
Here’s how: Text “Follow @teacher” to 21212
From here on in, anytime @teacher sends a tweet the subscribers will receive it as a text message; also, without the students ever giving out their cell numbers. I know of at least three teachers in Jasper Place High School who use this to communicate important information and updates to their students.
What might also be of interest to you is our live twitter feed at JP; teacher, student, and public tweets are displayed on our closed-loop TV system. We subscribe ($10/month) to tidytweets.com which searches the #jpREBELS hashtag and create an RSS feed of the tweets. Teacher are added to a safe list and automatically approved but I periodically check in (using my iphone) and manually approve student tweets. It’s been up since September and so far so good!
Dustin