Google Voice Is Now Available To Teachers And Students

Google Voice is now available to anyone (both students and teachers) in education with a .edu email account. Click on this link to see a video on all the cool features Google Voice has to offer: http://www.youtube.com/googlevoice.

I wrote a blog about Google Voice about a year ago. Google Voice www.google.com/voice is a free service. You still need a cell phone carrier. However, when you make a call to any number within the United States any day of the week and any hour of the day, the call is free because you dial your Google number to make the call. International calls are very reasonable. A call to Spain for example is only 2 cents a minute. You get to choose your Google phone number and area code from a list. If you change carriers, you Google number will stay the same. When someone calls your Google phone number you can have it ring your work cell number, personal cell number, desk phone, home phone, all of them or none of them depending on the time of day or the person calling you. Your messages are transcribed to text but the good thing is you don’t have to listen to the voice messages from each phone. You can access all your voice mail from your Google number. Your transcribed voice mails are also sent to your gmail account so you can read them at anytime no matter how noisy it is where you are. You can also set up different voice mail greetings depending on who is calling you. You can have one voice mail greeting for friends, one for work and yet another for your Mother-in-Law. Do I have your attention now! Speaking of Mother-in-Law’s, you can also block calls from a specific number. The next time she calls she will hear the message, “we’re sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or no longer in service. Don’t you just love technology! Google Voice also allows you to share your voice messages. Log into Google Voice select the voicemail you want to share and select email. Type in their address and click send. When a call comes in, you can take the call or send it to voice mail. To have a conference call, have the callers call your Google number. As your phone rings, you will be asked if you want to add the caller to your current call. With Google Voice Mobile App, you can visually navigate between your voice mails. You can also send SMS text messages without charges to your carrier. If you don’t have an .edu email address, I would still apply for a Google Voice account. It’s a very useful number to have.

Using Your Cell Phone To Blog

One of the challenges teachers must be aware of is the need to reach their students by infusing technology in the curriculum that the students use all the time. It’s no secret that students love their cell phones. It almost seems like they were born with the cell phone in their hand. They talk, they text, they exist!

Blogging is a way to get students to write. The teacher could set up a blog in a number of different ways. The teacher could create the blog and the students could comment. Another option would be to have certain student’s blog and the other students could comment. The students’ roles could change from week to week or month to month.


What if your students could blog from their phone? Would they be more likely to participate? Would they think that was cool? They can. They can write a post from a text message using their phone to bloggr (256447). Then they would write their post. 150 characters would count as one text message. Then they would click send. Blogger will send them a mobile blog URL and a claim token. Then they would go to: go.blogger.com, enter the claim token and the verification characters. They would sign into their blogger account and click continue. Then they would just choose the blog that the post should go to. Remember that the standard costs would be charged for texting by the phone carrier the student has.