Tag Archives: text

100 ways to use a VLE – #64 Text

There are many snazzy ways in which to use a VLE, with video, interactivity, discussion, images, audio and diagrams. Within this wealth of colour and noise we mustn’t forget the impact and power of simple text.

No I am not talking about uploading a Word document either. Most VLEs have the facility to create simple pages with text on them. It is this I am referring to when thinking about using text on the VLE.

A quote.

A poem.

A news article.

The power of the word should never be underestimated and the impact it can have on learners and learning.

Parents ‘want texts from schools’

Parents 'want texts from schools'

BBC reports on the survey from Becta about how schools need to use e-mail and SMS to communicate more with parents.

Many parents would like school reports on their children’s performance texted or e-mailed, a survey says.

One in 12 of the 1,493 parents polled by government education technology agency Becta said schools kept them informed using these methods.

But 68% of parents said they wanted schools to use such technologies to keep them up to date more frequently.

Of course if schools are to take heed of this survey, then FE Colleges need to do likewise. Does your FE College already communicate to the students by e-mail and/or SMS text messaging? Can the students communicate back?

How much SMS?

Well it would seem that we Britons like our SMS text messages. At the last count we were sending one billion of them weekly!

Britons are now sending more than one billion text messages per week according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

From the BBC.

Personally I am not a great fan of SMS in the main as I don’t like small phone keyboards, liked it when I could use it through my Mac OS X address book, but have generally either used the phone or e-mail.