Yesterday I found myself needing to get a message to my AP 12 students. I had the email addresses of most of them and the cell numbers of a few, but I found myself wishing for their cell numbers more than their email addresses. The reason? I know that email is soo last century … most of my students only check their email every few days at most. They check MySpace and Facebook every few hours, but not email. In fact, some of my students only check email if they’re registering for something or if someone tells them to (usually by text message).

To illustrate this point: I didn’t get a reply to any of the emails I sent out yesterday, but I got text-message replies immediately. The next day in class, many of them said “I didn’t get the email.” I discovered that this usually meant “I didn’t check my email.”

That got me thinking. I definitely don’t want to collect all of my students’ cell numbers and plug them into my phone, but it would be nice to be able to send all of them a text message about important announcements or reminders. So … I went searching, and I found two kinds of services: one-way alerts and two-way groups.

LoopNote is a one-way alert system. Students can sign up, join the appropriate “loop” (like Mr. Hoefler’s AP 12 Class), and then I can send them a brief message. Students can choose to have these delivered to their phone, email, IM, or even their RSS reader. They can’t reply to the message or send one back to me, though. It’s just an alert system.

iTexter is a two-way group system. Students can sign up, join the appropriate group, and that group gets a number assigned to it (like 335566). Now, anyone in the group can send a text message to that number and everyone else will get the message. If a student then replies to that message, everyone else in the group gets the reply.

I know there are other, similar services out there, but these two seem to be the easiest. At this point, LoopNote looks like the better solution for what I need, though I can see how iTexter might suit other situations better. (For instance, when we take the publications students to New York City in March, it might be good if every student in the group could have one number to text that would let everyone else get the message.)

There will no doubt be some reservations from some people. I can imagine parents and students worrying about the privacy of their cell phone number or the extra cost messages might add to their cell bill. Even though most of my students have cell phones, not all do. In addition, my school has a strict no-cell-phone policy: students cannot have them on or visible during school hours. (Of course, since I’m concerned mainly with passing on announcements and reminders after school, this isn’t really an issue).

I’ve posed this question to my students on the site blog and posted a survey for them to complete. I’m interested to hear their responses.

I know this is just the tip of the mobile-learning iceberg, but we all have to start somewhere. Do you have any experience with a similar service or setup? Do you have arguments for or against this idea? Do you think the one-way (LoopNote) or two-way (iTexter) version is better? Do you know of other services that would be better for this purpose?

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