This afternoon I had a very positive conversation with Lilian Soon from textwall.co.uk. In a nutshell textwall.co.uk it’s a response system where responders text, email, webpost their responses. Think Twitterfall for texting. Lilian gave me access to a sandbox account and I had a really good nose round. I was pleasantly surprised.
There are three main flavours, a single textwall £30, very useful for the individual teacher or trainer. Two versions of textwallplus, 10 textwalls @ £200 or 25 textwalls @ £400. Now, in my opinion that’s great value, considering there’s a hatful of functionality to muse over. Auto refresh control, RSS, questions, bad word filters, wordle integrations, text size, export and more.
Of course it goes without saying that you, the host, are not charged for messages you receive but it does costs the learner their standard sms charge to text the system. But with unlimited text message plans seemingly the norm in my school, the cost of a texting for learning, may be soon an issue of the past? What is it like in your school? Of course, students could choose not to response or you could choose a non-tech voting method. I am a big fan of the mini whiteboard and Caesar’s thumb. But for £30 for you, or maybe £20 for each member of the department it seems good value to me. A simple code protects from SPAM texts. Simple.
Next step – try out the sandbox with a class. I will most certainly be able to demonstrate progress in my lessons, that is for sure.
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Look forward to hearing how you get on with your class. One thing I always say to people trying out new technology with a group of people – give them some time for horseplay to start with before you attempt anything serious! And the higher up Bloom’s taxonomy you go with your questioning, the better the results you’ll get. So don’t ask them what they had for breakfast, ask them why breakfast is so important or to design a nutritious breakfast – in one text message!
The latter exercise should create a lovely Wordle from the textwall. You can also click on one message and it will fill the whole screen to help focus discussion.
You’re full of ideas, Kristian, so no doubt I’ll hear more from you 🙂
Wow. Lilian thanks. I will let you know how we get on.
As for the Wordel, I will explore this more in the lesson. I am going to start with PSRE Year 11. Almost all of these students have phones. It might get a bit hectic but its worth exploring.