A visit from the Superintendent

Today I had a surprise visit from Mat Holton, our Superintendent, and Michelle Boyette, our principal here at Colony High School. Although a surprise, I was glad to see them. I shared what we were doing in class and also demonstrated some things I am doing with my iPad. That includes using it as a VNC viewer to remotely control my Mac with my iPad. This is particularly nice because I use Easy Grade Pro which is not available on the iPad as a standalone app for grading. My favorite feature of that program is that I can enter grades using the seating chart view. This way I can get out among my students more directly and not having to be tied behind my desk as much or having to print out a lot of paper for seating charts and such. Anyway, the main reason why I am writing about this is that Mr. Holton asked me to try to find an innovative way to use cell phones in the classroom. That is an interesting challenge. Obviously, I have my website that students use to access our daily learning activities anyway, but the problem is that we do not have ubiquitous WiFi here on campus. That is a pretty big deterrent. Well, the thing I want to research in this direction is how well I could offer online polls or something that would let them text in a response to a given question. That way, if it works, other teachers could use it to have their students respond to polls in class and quickly tabulate the data to check for learning. Now, I just have to find a free service that would let us do text messaging and tabulation. I know of paid services, but not any free services. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad