hi it's emily contributing blogger over at secondarysolutionsblog.com and today i want to talk about celly a platform that allows teachers students parents and other educators to communicate via the web text message or the selly app in a way that's private safe and has appropriate boundaries we all know how much students like to text so why not harness that power so to sign up you start off by going to cel.ly once you sign up for this free platform you'll be asked to create cells and sell could be for each of your class periods if you moderate a club if you have a team you can create a cell for each one so that students and parents and you are communicating with the right group so i'm gonna start a cell here and i'm gonna start a cell for um english period two and i'm in room 804 so i'm gonna say 804 english period two 804 and in ventura california and i'm not going to worry about hashtags for members i'm going to make it restricted so that only my students can join i'm going to create a password maybe our school mascot i'm going to hide the member list for chat mode you can create a curated chat and this is the kind of chat where all the messages students are going to send are going to go directly to you as the moderator and you can rebroadcast to other people if you want but everything's going to come to you and open chat means every message from every student will come to every student this can cause a lot of messages but it's ideal for students who are working in lab groups or group projects who really need to be in on everything but it's for a small group alert only is when you have a really big group like a team or a school-wide announcement or something like that where you want to send something out but you don't want people to be able to reply to you i'm going to create a curated chat for my class discussions so that i can approve all messages and receive all messages make sure i have a good handle on what's happening here um for the cell details i'm going to keep it private so i'm going to start myself period 2 is all set up i'm going to invite students to join my group so i'm going to click share and i can either send them a public link where they'll have to put in click on it and then put in the password i can send them a golden ticket where they'll just automatically be added to my class or i could just ask them to text at english period 2804 to the number two three five five nine that's the easiest way as long as it's okay that they're texting regular text message rates apply so if they don't have unlimited or large number of texts they should not choose this option they should click the link and i can share the link through a variety of means i could also click invite members and then i can enter email addresses especially for students who don't have as many text messages although i find that that's increasingly rare that students don't have text message plans that allow for them to text a lot teachers and other educators use selling for a variety of purposes the most common use for a whole classroom that i've seen is an interactive wall in which the teacher projects the admin cell and students text in to discuss ideas during reading or video other uses include sending safe private messages to clubs teams or field trip attendees creating small study groups or group project cells and using polling for introduction activities or formative assessment here are two ways i can see sully enhancing my classroom instruction i could use sally as an unobtrusive aide during library research to do this i create a cell for my classes when working in the library while we're all spread out on the computers stacks and periodicals students can texting questions without disturbing the other students they could ask things like how do i find the 800 section or how do i cite a book then i could respond quickly and quietly when appropriate i could send frequently asked questions or just grade questions to the whole class with text or even with links to the answer like how to cite a book i could also see myself using selly polls as a warm-up or performative assessment at the end of the lecture for example as a warm-up i could ask students a polling question about last night's reading like this one from the great gatsby students then could easily use the app or text in to select an answer this would create an instant graph of information for myself and for the students to begin our lesson or we could do it at the end of the lecture as formative assessment so for five dollars more there are other features including more advanced assessment options i'd love to hear your thoughts on the school new classroom tool visit us at secondarysolutionsblog.com for more thank you