SCVNGR Hunt via SMS

Remember playing scavenger hunts when you were younger? You know, being given a clue that would lead you to a place, then getting another clue until you end up at the finish and hopefully get a prize if you're first.

Well, now (inevitable I suppose) this can be done via SMS through a company called SCVNGR. Seems an interesting idea and I reckon it could be fun for a group of students, particularly as an end of term game or review activity. Good thing is that it is totally SMS-based, and so will work with any phone.

Anyhow, this video gives an overview of it, and I'm interested to try this out. Next week is the end of term, so I might just try to set it up for one of my groups on the last day of term.



UPDATE: just discovered that this service is not available outside the US, which is a shame. Hopefully someone will do something similar here as I think there is definitely a market for it.

How to involve more members in my mobile group?

In my previous post I described how I got my Twitter group off the ground and students were beginning to sign up and make their initial posts. I think now I've got 12 students signed up. To encourage students to respond I tried to post a steady stream of useful language learning links as well as put up a question of the day for them to answer.

Two of the students have really taken to it and they are following the links, responding to the questions, and it's great. But from the rest there doesn't seem to be the same level of interest and they haven't really posted at all.

I need to try to find out why the other students don't seem so engaged. Maybe they thought this group was going to be something different, maybe more SMS based, but I've been trying to avoid doing everything through SMS because of the potential cost to them of responding via text.

Maybe they just aren't reading the tweets! I'm not sure that every member has regular access to a computer, so today I wrote to all of them by SMS and explained how they could send and receive tweets via their mobile phone - as this is after all supposed to be a mobile phone group. Anyhow I think a short survey might be useful to find out what their expectations might be

This week I will continue with the Twitter feed but also try something else to see if it interests or involves more of them. Maybe something via text, a Word of The Day or something similar. Anyhow, I'll keep trying and see what interests/involves them..

Growing Pains of my mobile ESL group

In my previous post I wrote that I had finally set up my group and was in the process of trying to get all the members signed up to a private twitter group. We're not quite there yet, but ten of them have now registered for Twitter and have successfully added at least one post to the timeline. Very impressed because I'm not sure I fully understand how it's all working...but it is. Anyhow, here's a snapshot of the Twitter page just to prove it.



It may look like I'm the only one posting but that's just the nature of a Twitter group, everything is via the group name and the individual is identified with the prefix 'via'.

I've written to all the group members to explain how the Twitter group will work. Every day I will post a question for them to respond to, and I will regularly post links for language learning sites and information/links for how to use their mobile phones for improving their English. I've also explained to them how to post to Twitter from their phones as I suspect most of them are using their computer at the moment. But that's ok, I think it will take time for them to get comfortable using their phones for things other than voice and text. Slowly, slowly.....

My mobile group has started!

The poster campaign to get students to sign up didn't work, not one response and I suppose fittingly it was only when I sent out a block SMS to all the students at the school that I got some kind of response.

In fact, I've now got 12 students signed up and I expect at least a few more over the next few days. I've capped the group at 20, though I don't think I'll get that many.

Ok, now comes the tricky part working out how to structure it. My basic idea for the group is to set up one or two core streams of information and communication. Initially I thought about relying purely on SMS with members communicating with each other and me through texts. I abandoned that idea when I realised it might prove quite expensive for some of them. I'm on an unlimited text plan so it's not a problem for me, but I'm sure that's not true for most of them and sending out group texts might prove expensive. I really want to minimize as much as possible their costs for doing this.

So I did a bit of research and came up with the idea of using a private Twitter group as the main form of communication. The main benefits of this are: firstly, most phones (even lower end ones) have some kind of twitter client available to them, and secondly, it's possible to send and receive tweets from the group via SMS. This means that the students can send one SMS message and it will be received by all the members of the group, either via their twitter client or their SMS inbox. There may be better solutions available, but this seemed the best temporary way to get around the range of handsets and dataplans they have.

This of course is probably the biggest challenge of setting up a mobile group. Some of the students have the latest handsets with all the newest features (wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, GPS etc) and all you can eat dataplans. Others, however, are using minimal data on Pay As You Go and have basic handsets with only voice and text functions. While mobiles can be seen to democratize the learning process (available all the time), those with more money are still likely to get a richer experience. So, by using Twitter groups I'm hoping to level things out a little for the members of the group.

So, this week will be spent setting up a private Twitter group and then trying to explain to them how to sign up for it - a not inconsiderable task given the range of English levels and technical knowledge among them. I really want to do as much of it as possible via their phones, though to sign up for twitter some of them are clearly going to have to use a computer. By the end of this week I will be very happy if every member has posted just once to the group!

In the following weeks I will then experiment with a variety of mobile learning opportunities - IM chats, sending quizzes/materials via SMS, polls via SMS and others I've yet to research. But student feedback about these, any messages from me, indeed any random thought they want to share can be done through the Twitter group. We'll see how it goes, I'm genuinely very excited about this...