janetn's blog

The article I read was, “Text Messaging and the Community of Inquiry in Online Courses” by Cindy L. Kovalik. This article was extremely interesting to me. It discussed a study that had teachers and students text to communicate. All participants willingly gave their numbers to have reminders of assignments, exams, quizzes, etc. I do not like the idea what so ever. I understand that most students LOVE to text, but I do not find it professional what so ever. First off, you usually do not use professional or proper grammar in texting. I can only imagine how crazy that would make an English teacher seeing un-capitalized  letters and misspelled words. A problem addressed in the article is what do you do for students that may not have a cellular phone that receives text messaging or they have a limited amount?  Those students did not participate so I feel as if the survey is bias.

The majority of students that took the survey, around 65%, said that the text reminders were helpful in staying on track with their work. An amazing 90% of students said that using text messaging can have a useful purpose in the classroom and 82% said it had a positive impact on the class.

I guess using this in a college classroom could be helpful, but I do not see it helpful in a high school setting. I think it would lower the respect level between teacher and student(s). Students should be responsible enough to either write their assignments down, look them up on the course calendar, or email or discussion board the teacher to find out what is due.