Symphonies Use Texting to Draw Younger Crowds

Image: Joi via Flickr

The NY Times ran a story describing how symphonies around the country are letting audiences text to choose encores. The symphonies are hoping that a more interactive show will draw younger crowds.

If a 16th century art form can adapt to the times I am sure a 20th century model of schools can change as well.

The best use of cellphones I have read about recently is a History teacher who lets students keep their cellphones on their desk, when a question comes up that no one knows the answer to he lets them text Cha Cha which is a texting search engine for the answer.

Have Google Grade Your Papers

One of the most valuable but under used Google Apps has to be the Forms feature of Google Spreadsheets. I have started giving my students quizzes using Forms. Forms is a tool that lets you create survey questions with multiply choice, short answer or long answer responses. Using the above IF STATEMENT a teacher can program the Google Form to grade itself. I then filter the grades into my gradebook spreadsheet. The above statement checks if the student's answer matches the correct answer of -21 in cell M1. If the answer is correct the student gets 100, if the answer is incorrect the student gets a 0.