The Innovative

• The Innovative Educator: Five Ways Innovative Educators Can Use Texting As a Professional Tool

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  • Five Ways Innovative Educators Can Use Texting As a Professional Tool
  • Texting as an Efficient and Effective Communication Tool
  • disruptive announcement system
  • enables educators to communicate short, efficient messages to one another without robbing students of instructional time.
  • Enhancing The Home-School Connection
  • The Journal has an excellent article on how schools are using notification tools for more than emergency alerts. In fact some schools are using it in a way that can revolutionize parent involvement moving beyond basics using services such as TeleParent (thejournal.com/articles/22398 04/01/08)
  • According to the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory study, “Students with involved parents are more likely to attend school regularly, earn higher grades, and have better social skills.”
  • Free Audience Response System
  • With Poll Everywhere everyone's voice can be heard by texting 99503 and texting in your vote just like they do on American Idol. No equipment needed or software to download within seconds educators have audience responses.
  • SMS Tweeting from Your Phone to Gain a Collective Intelligence on Topics of Importance
  • Twitter is a great tool for schools to use to share interesting and relevant information with the student body, staff, parents and family.
  • Once you're set up, you can start tweeting your way into the microblogging community. Here are some ways you may want to use Twitter. 1) If school staff are attending a conference or professional development activity they tweet reflections, favorite quotes, or reactions to what they're learning. You can read how a group of school leaders did this at Leading By Example - Transforming Education for the 21st Century (http://tinyurl.com/leadbyexample). 2) School staff can tweet interesting announcements, updates, and activities at any time into the school account. This can be fed right into a school website providing the school community, parents, and more with an ongoing stream of updates about school happenings. See how one school does this at www.martavalle.org. 3) Use your class, library, or lab twitter account to share news and information with your students and teachers. For a great example of how this is done, follow Tracy Karas of Marta Valle High School in New York City at http://twitter.com/MartaVLibrary.
  • Google SMS as an Educational Tool That Can Be Used Directly From Your Phone
  • Editors note: Unfortunately, even as a Technology Innovation Manager, I have been cut off from using this innovative digital tool since October after a decision was made for NYC DOE employees that ALL TEXT MESSAGING capabilities for DOE account holders will be disabled. It was a NYCDOE policy decision to disable the text messaging feature from all DOE issued devices. The rational for the disabling this service is all devices provided are for DOE business related communication and this communication must be documented. It is also the DOE position that communication thru text messaging is primarily for “personal use." Upon further investigation I learned the service could be restored if a professional case was made for using texting. I made my case more than two months ago and still have no service.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.