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Last night I read about Wiffiti on Liz Kolb’s blog. At this site you can can set up a page to which people can text information. Using Liz’s idea of Wiffiti as a brainstorming activity, I set my students to work with the topic “What do you know about elements, compounds, and mixtures?” While this message was posted on the screen in the front of the room, students text-ed their responses. About half of my students had text message enabled cell phones and so far 50+ messages have been sent to my page. The experience has been…interesting. Here are a few things I learned.
1. Kids don’t text as fast as I thought they would.
2. In spite of posting a very clear topic, students will still post random messages. Fortunately, Wiffiti has filtering built in and you can always go and delete a message. You can also block certain senders. On top of that, I found the following warning to my students to be quite helpful and it put an end to the “hi” and smiley faces that kept popping up.
“I believe students can use cell phones as a learning tool. Think of the teacher you know who hates cell phones. If you post inappropriate or off topic messages you will be proving that person right and me wrong…and your phones will be disappearing forever into your pocket.”
3. For some reason Wiffiti numbers each message and from what I can tell there is no way to reset the numbers. I also noticed that there is no way to make your first post stay on the screen while others are added and there seems to be no “off switch” where you can still read the page, but senders can no longer send messages. If any Wiffiti people read this, please add those features.
Overall, I found Wiffiti to be quite useful. With a few additional classroom management tools thrown in our next experience should run a little smoother. My middle school students were fully engaged during this activity. Not an eye left the screen or cell phone and students were discussing and posting off of the messages that popped up. Pretty cool!
Joe
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This is really a fun activity for kids. I like your approach in controlling it so that they participated the way you wanted them to. Thanks for sharing!
My only worry would be those students with plans that require them to pay for text messages. I would hate to field that phone call about why their child was sending expensive text messages in class. As long as it is clear that they are allowed to text it could be a fun and engaging lesson.
Good point! I forgot to mention that before we even started I gave my kids a lecture about only using their cell phone if they had unlimited text. I explained that should I have any phone calls I would be referring their parents back to them. Those who couldn’t’ text put their phones away. It seemed like most of my kids either couldn’t text at all (the feature was unavailable on their phone) or they had unlimited text messages.
Joe
I can’t believe how quickly you were able to put the Wiffiti resource into action in your classroom! I only see my students 2 times a week, so it usually takes me a bit longer. Lisa made a good pt about the text messaging, but I have quickly been learning from the high schoolers in Southeastern Michigan that many of them have the unlimited text messaging packages (usually they have been cell packages than I do!?). I also like your idea for using Wiffiti as a question board, I might try that this week with my students. Great blog by the way, I’m a new subscriber, you won me over!
Thanks for sending this to me, Joe. Looks very cool. I’m going to try it tomorrow. Good idea, Liz.
Thanks for sharing and testdriving this resource. I will definitely add it to the group participation activities that I use during my geocaching workshops. Geocachers can log their finds during the workshop by taking and posting cell phone pictures to a web gallery, phoning in a podcast response to gabcast, and now by texting about a geocache find to wiffiti. I’m hoping that these resources will provide some ideas on how cell phones can be a tool rather than a distraction to learning.
I haven’t tried sending pictures because I have the non-MMS iPhone. I wonder if picture text messages would work. Let me know if you find out.
I’m reading this, wiffiti.com is actually about to change a lot in the near future. Let us know what you think. Personally, I’m pretty excited about the use of this in Education though its not our primary focus, hopefully we can make everybody happy.
Good to know. I’ll keep my eyes posted on the Wiffiti site. Liz Kolb talks about Wiffiti in her new book.
Great insights on how students are using Wiffiti. The ‘off screen’ feature is a great suggestion, I’ll add it to our wish list (I work at Wiffiti
We’re in the process of releasing the new version of Wiffiti with new features coming out every week. We’ve gotten rid of the ‘numbers,’ and we’ve added back the ‘delete messages’ feature. The interface is different now, but play around at http://wiffiti.com and see how you like the new version.
Not sure if middle school-ers are using Twitter yet, but it’s a great way to send messages to the screen using the web (that way they don’t have to worry about text message plans).
Interesting, I’ll have to check it out. I showed Wiffiti to a group of college teachers yesterday. They liked it quite a bit.
Joe
I have recently stumbled on the Wiffiti page and plan to use it in my class to see how students can use their phones as an educational tool. We are trying to convince the county to stop banning and start embracing. Maybe I can video it and let them see the true educational benefit of cell phones. Thanks for the reviews and the information about the resource.
Hello Joe!
I tried to send this via E-mail, but I could not get it to go through. I was wondering if I could ask you a few short questions about your middle school science project, “Brainstorming text messaging of science unit concepts”.
1) How did you go about implementing the project?
2) What was the school district’s policy on cell phone use in school?
3) What challenges, both technical and policy related did you face?
4) What type of parental involvement and feedback did you receive?
5) Any suggestions for implementing such a project?
6) Have you done any other projects using cell phones?
If you choose to participate the interview will be documented for educational purpose.
Thanks you in advance for you time.
Sincerely,
Kathleen Wojciechowski
6th grade learning support teacher
Wilkes University Educational Instructional Technology Graduate Student