SMS: Another option for communicating with your students?

Most of us are now familiar with text messaging, a way to send short text messages to cell phones. Teenagers seem especially adept at sending text messages, demonstrated by their fingers moving across their cell phones at warp speed. Why is text messaging becoming so popular, what is it, and should you use it to communicate with your students?

First of all, many phone carriers now include text messaging as part of their package, with some offering unlimited messaging, so the ability to send and receive messages this way is growing. Also, you don’t have to disturb someone by calling them, but instead send them a text message they can instantly read. One of my theories for the popularity of text messaging among students is that they can send messages in class to each other essentially under the radar. It’s difficult to catch a student text messaging when the teacher is focused on delivering a lesson, for instance.

What is text messaging? It’s called SMS, which stands for Short Message Service, a communication standardized in the GSM mobile communication system, using standardized protocols, which allows the sending of short text messages between mobile platforms. But text messaging is not only limited to cell phones. You can send text messages from your computer to another mobile phone (which is a heck of a lot easier for me to type than on my iPhone). I like using Google Chat’s built-in SMS text messaging feature. I can easily send a text message to any of my contacts’ cell phones (of course, you need to know the phone number) through Google Chat. If they send a message back to me on their mobile phone,  it will appear in my Google chat box, too. Pretty handy.

Here are some other interesting facts about SMS (from wikipedia):

SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.

SMS as used on modern handsets was originally defined as part of the GSM series of standards in 1985 as a means of sending messages of up to 160 characters (including spaces), to and from GSM mobile handsets. Most SMS messages are mobile-to-mobile text messages, though the standard supports other types of broadcast messaging as well.

How might SMS be used with your students? First of all, SMS can really enhance communication. If you used SMS to communicate important updates to your students, you would feel confident that they received the information in a very timely way. Also, your students could easily contact you with a quick question or other needed information using SMS. You can set up a class group and send an SMS message to that group, like an email, only faster, more efficient, and possibly more apparent, since email messages can be lost or ignored.

Of course, you would need to gauge the value of instant mobile communication with your students against the possible infringement of your own privacy. You would probably want to include a list of conventions students would follow, such as “don’t message me during weekends or after 5 pm.” Offering students multiple ways to contact you is always a trade-off of sorts, but in the long run, you might have happier, more efficient students.