Free SMS Educational Tools

Using SMS for education generally costs money. Even if you use free software you will generally end up paying someone for each text you send. However there are free tools out there that incorporate free SMS functionality. Twitter and Jaiku are two simple ones. With these tools you type short messages and they are published to a website, to SMS and to an rss feed in what is known as a stream.

With either of these services you could create a user account and have your students "follow" that user. Then they turn on the option to receive SMS updates and will receive a text anytime you update your account. You can update your account from the twitter/Jaiku website (or even via sms). In this way students opt in to follow your stream. And of course they participate by creating their own streams but let's just keep it simple and consider it a broadcast

All of the updates you make will be available as a web feed as Dave Foord points out. What this means is that you say it once but your message goes out in different formats such as SMS, Moodle etc.

Another thing you could use to send free SMS alerts to students is Google calendar. This would be handy for tutorial/lab/assignment-due dates. Especially if these change a lot. Set up a calendar and let students subscribe.

These solutions rely on getting students to set up an account with a service and then subscribe to the account you have set up. It would be useful for opt-in (i.e. non-compulsory systems). If you can sit down your students and sign them up then the running is very easy for them but there is that initial overhead. Plus your service may not discriminate on who it sends texts to so suppose your student already uses twitter for socialising he/she may not want to hear the constant chatter on their mobile (or course they might!). In this case they could set up a specific account to subscribe to your account. Some services discriminate and privatize nicely - like Google calendar. There is one flaw with privatising a stream though and that is authentication - private feeds are not really possible. So you can't set up a private calendar, twitter user (i.e. one with protected updates) or jaiku user/channel and then import the feed from the source into say Moodle. You either make everything public, which gives you the web feed which you can show in your VLE, or you make it private and use only SMS. In the latter case you will have to update the VLE separately from the tool you are using to broadcast SMS. This is the second real drawback to this approach after the initial subscriber setup. The real advantage to these approaches are

1. they're free


2. did I mention free?


3. Web-based tools easy to administer


4. Free god dammit!

The fact that these tools are easy to set up and use should not be understated. I estimate these solutions would be easier to set up and use than any pay-as-you-go commercial type offerings - at least from the educator end.

These tools definitely come under the banner of disruptive technology. They are something which can change a learning environment but really what they do is chip away at a pre-existing business model (which is good news for us).

Further reading on disruptive technology:

Death of the Interactive Whiteboard