Technology in the classroom part 8

As promised, I want to tell you about an experiment I carried out with these two groups of students.
I was hypothesizing that it would be the interaction among the students- and not the technology- that would help them learn. I believe that technology is a tool that helps us find, store, retrieve, and share information, but it doesn't necessarily make us learn. In order to test this idea, and also to give students an example of what kind of project I was talking about, I came up with the following scheme.
I asked the teachers to ask the students for their cell phones numbers. I told them to reassure the students that this was totally optional, and that nothing would happen if they preferred not to give their numbers. Nobody opted out. Then, I asked the teachers to tell me a word that had come up in the class and that they students hadn't known. In one group, it was stuffy; in the other, it was box office. Fortunately, my cell phone has software that you can download onto your computer. With this, it's very easy to send multiple text messages. I wrote the vocabulary words, plus a definition and example, I typed in the cell phone numbers, and I sent them off.
The teachers tell me the students were totally amazed. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world. They asked me if I would continue to send them words, and I agreed to do so for the remainder of the course. Students who hadn't attended class that day asked if I could include them, and the word even got around to students from other groups, who wanted to join in.
Needless to say, it was expensive, but the students learned the vocabulary, as shown by a post-test (average score, 19/20 words), and they expressed positive or very positive views about receiving their word a day by phone. There are some websites that permit mass messaging at low cost. I think it's worth looking into and exploiting, but it's not the objective of my research, so I'll put it on hold for a while.