Students’ Own Mobile Devices and Celly Provide Peer Feedback

This is part of my continuing series of blogs where I am reporting how I am integrating students’ own mobile devices into the classroom activities.

Using Celly

Celly was used for the learning activity that is described later in this blog.

Celly creates mini social networks called cells that connect you with people and topics. A cell can contain anybody with a cellphone. We let you define filters based on hashtags, location, time, and user identity. Celly lets you instantly group people and topics into cells.  Cells function as chatrooms where people communicate instantly via text-based messaging. Cells can also include messages from the web or other social networks to capture your interests.

Learn It in 5 provides the following tutorial about how to set up and use Celly.

Ways to use Celly at school can be found here.

Peer Feedback in an Interview Activity

Students in my undergraduate course on Interpersonal Relationships were asked to practice their active listening skills.  They conducted interviews with each pair of interviewers-interviewees being observed by their classmates.  Feedback to the interviewer was provided via Celly.

First they were provided with the following information to join the class cell.

The format for texting in their feedback was @interpersonal (cell) “The Feedback” #(person’s first name).

During the interviews, students texted their observations of the interviewer behaviors to Celly.

   

After each interview, the feedback was projected on the whiteboard.  This way students could view personal feedback, get ideas of appropriate interview behaviors, and analyze the quality of effective feedback.