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help kids or die » PhoneVite for Teachers

Okay, maybe, possibly, I’m off hiatus. (Probably not). I just want to take a second, get my head above water, and talk about something I did this Friday.

At my school we have to use every possible means of contacting students. We are truly in the struggle to save lives and contact by any means necessary has to happen. Although I am strong in communicating with my students by email, and blog, and video, one of the areas I know that I have been weak in over the last six weeks in by using the plain old phone. This is not a good place to be weak because I know that’s where most of my student’s parents exist. They’re not watching YouTube but they do have a cell phone in their pocket.

I needed a way to get over this weakness, quick.

Many months ago my source of all things good on the web, Mashable, mentioned a new service called PhoneVite.

PhoneVite allows you to make mass phone calls and collect a response. So, this Friday I placed a phone call to sixty-or-so students that I am concerned about. Let me walk you through the process:

1. Set up a PhoneVite account and set my cell-phone as the caller ID number (I couldn’t use my work number because I’m behind an extension).
2. Recorded the message I wanted to send out using the same headset I use for Skype (but you can do this by phone as well).
3. Bought $20 worth of phone calls from PhoneVite.
4. Inserted the phone numbers I wanted to call.
5. Clicked send.
6. Watched both my work and cell phone explode for about 20 minutes.

Now, there’s a lot of talk about how parents aren’t involved in their students education. I’ve got about 20 minutes of evidence that would refute that. My work phone wouldn’t stop ringing. My cell phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. There were calls that I missed in that 20 minutes because both of the lines were tied up. In short, it was awesome.

$2.85 and ten minutes later all sixty phone calls had been placed and all but two connected. PhoneVite shows the amount of time that the call was listened to and all that connected made it though the entire 50 second recorded message. Only one family blocked future calls from PhoneVite (one of the options offered at the end of the call) but it provided the number that asked to be blocked, so next time I’ll just make a personal call to them.

In the future I’m going to use more of the features in PhoneVite to poll parents and get feedback but for this first round I couldn’t be happier with the results.

Technorati Tags: phonevite, using old technology in new ways, hey is that my horn? Let me toot it for a second

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.