ProfessorTOSA Blog

Text the Mob. Just the title suggests technology meshed with civil disobedience – what’s not to like. This software allows you to poll your audience for questions with their cell phones as well as create bulletin boards for your audience/class to post questions and comments. Simple and wide open for creativity.

For simple polling (like my colleagues and I will do for coming professional dev.) Text the Mob works fine and serves a novel purpose. In our classrooms, more importantly, you turn cell phones or computers into simple collaborative tools and by using a high interest technologies, as phones and computers, teachers can accurately check the pulse and opinions of the class. I can imagine this in writing, as prompts and fuel for discussions and certainly the coming political election can provide some divisive prompts to poll.

So, try it. Like most “Web 2.0″ tools, this one will certainly not take the world by storm. But it is fun and can serve a small purpose within a well constructed classroom. That’s the trick, isn’t it, to coordinate and juggle all of these small tools of high interest in order to stay fresh and keep things moving and offer breath to our curriculum and our careers.