Show and Tell

How to utilize cell phones in the classroom.
A big problem in schools is the debate of whether or not to incorporate or even allow cell phones in the classroom. When I had my internship in a high school ceramics classroom my mentor teacher used a site called polleverywhere.com
http://www.polleverywhere.com/

One can create a poll or ask questions to either a specific group of people or to the general public. This can be used for many different things, but my mentor teacher would use it to instigate talking within the class. At first I thought this was strange, using cell phones to instigate a conversation in the "real world", but what I saw really worked.
She would use the site to create a poll with questions like "Which work do you think was the most successful... What piece did you like the most and why... What did you like about this assignment" and others. The students would go on their cellphones and submit their answers. The website would gather their answers and the teacher would display the results on the projector. After looking at the answers the class would discuss the work and the answers to the questions asked. Normally in a critique the hardest part is actually starting a discussion. No one really wants to be the first to talk, yet using this process they write out their answers anonymously. I feel when the students saw that others thought similarly to their responses they were more confident and able to talk freely during the critique.