Are you texting enough in school?

Dale

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the spring:

Young adults are the most avid texters by a wide margin. Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day—that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month—and the typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1500 messages per month).

Here’s how the rest of the nation breaks down.

Who Texts
Wow! According to this table, I’m over 65!

Read the whole report.

This reminds me of a Dilbert I saw recently.

I’m with Dilbert, but our students are not.

Here are two ways to use text messaging with students:

  1. post announcements to Twitter and have students follow via text message
  2. use Google Voice to have students text their questions to your email

2 thoughts to “Are you texting enough in school?”

  1. Another way to text in class is through polleverywhere.com. You can set up “clicker” type questions and students can text their answer for instant feedback. I’ve used this on review days before a test. Students seem to enjoy it.

  2. This is a really interesting article. I have been trying to encourage my students to make better use of their cell phones in my classroom. I have 10 computers in my room, but that only allows about a third of my kids to access information on the internet. Many kids have cell phone plans with data, and we broadcast a wireless signal throughout our campus so ipod users can get online as well. This has made the internet as a research tool more useful than before and doesn’t require me to go to a computer lab to do research each time I want them to find answers as a class (which is a waste anyway since the lab has 26 computers and I have at least 30 kids in every class). I have also tried to use some internet websites that allow you to post a question with multiple choice answers that are chosen through texting. This was a fun process, but I found that only about 70% of the kids in my classes had the ability to text, and each number could only answer the question once. This made getting a complete picture of the class understanding impossible using this method. Hopefully in the future this will change and I will be able to use this method more effectively. Oh yeah, the Dilbert cartoon is hilarious.

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