Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Texting poetry inspires kids to learn

...Chester Middle School Principal Ernie Jackson, for instance, challenged reading and social studies teacher Mel Wesenberg to find ways to use text messaging to teach poetry.

The results were surprising: Kids who used their cell phones to boil down the main points of the stanzas got 80 percent of the questions about a poem correct on a state test.

Kids taught the same poem in the traditional way – reading, reciting and discussing – got only 40 percent of the questions right.

“That's a big jump,” Jackson said during a recent demonstration of the experiment with a sixth-grade class...

Complete article

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I know that some teachers use interclassroom texting chats to discuss topics, have contests, etc. A teacher from an elementary actually requested a custom texting system on an online texting site to be used for students so they could all send text messages online (well, the teacher would send the texts) and all the classes could read the text thread via projection onto wall, etc. Then each class could contribute to the conversation.