App review by Mieke VanderBorght, Common Sense Education | Updated October 2016

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The Mood Meter

Name: The Mood Meter
Item: The Mood Meter
Rating: 4
Author: Mieke VanderBorght

Well-designed tool encourages kids to reflect on and manage emotions

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Learning rating

Editorial review by Common Sense Education

Community rating

Based on 1 review

Privacy rating

by Common Sense

Grades

6–12 This grade range is based on learning appropriateness and doesn't take into account privacy. It's determined by Common Sense Education, not the product's publisher.

Subjects & Skills

Health & Wellness, Character & SEL

Great for

SEL

Take a look inside

5 images

The tutorial provides an overview and offers insights on how to use the app.

Kids explore a grid of emotions to describe their current mood.

In 150 characters or less, kids describe the situation that led to that mood.

After reporting a mood, kids can choose to finish there or see or create strategies to help shift their mood.

Explore past moods through the big-picture view and detailed reports.

Pros: Elegant emotion grid and reports reveal surprisingly deep insights.

Cons: Built-in inspirational images and text are limited, so users should create their own.

Bottom Line: Appealing, thought-provoking tool builds emotional intelligence.

How Can I Teach with This Tool?

Help students compose a list of quotes and strategies to customize the app. Encourage kids to set reminders to track their moods regularly for a day, a week, or a month, and then examine the results. Have students discuss how often they have certain feelings and what sorts of situations provoke different moods.

There is no capability to create multiple user accounts, so kids will need to have their own devices to track their emotions. Or, teachers could use the app as a general classroom mood meter to gauge how the class is feeling at certain points of the day.

What Is It?

In this app for analyzing, tracking, and monitoring mood, users plot their moods on a color-coded chart filled with words describing feelings. After browsing the plot and selecting a mood, users describe, in 150 characters, what caused that mood. Next, they choose Stay Here, which records the feedback and ends the exercise, or Shift Here to browse strategies that might help shift their mood. Strategies include images, quotes, coping strategies, and a list of the user's past descriptions linked to positive moods.

In Mood Meter, students can add images, strategies, and quotes to each section. Each mood is recorded in the Reports section, which offers a pie-chart breakdown of the user's moods. Kids can adjust the chart for a particular date range, browse individual entries, email their pie charts and "reasons why" list, and set reminders to send push notifications reminding them to pause and record a mood. They can also share their mood information through Facebook or Twitter.

Is It Good for Learning?

Mood Meter offers a visually appealing, engaging tool for tracking emotions. Exploring the grid of words is surprisingly fun as dots expand and contract with a tap. The grid's visual metaphor alone is instructive; even if users don't spend much time with the app's reports, they're likely to gain insight from the spectrum of words and how they relate to one another. It might be nice if the app included definitions of the emotion words to help users determine if that's the right description for their mood.

The Reports section is similarly clever. Sorting responses by date and color gives a nuanced look at the user's emotions under different conditions and over time. It's helpful that users can easily add their own entries, making this a great fit for those tracking their moods in a classroom or therapeutic setting. With guidance from a professional, these sections could be filled with high-quality, highly personalized coping strategies as well as comforting words and images.

Learning Rating

Overall Rating

Engagement Would it motivate students and hold their interest? Is it visually appealing? Would it inspire teachers to try something new or change their instruction?

This isn't exactly a "fun" app, but the simple interface provides a highly customizable, visually appealing user experience.

Pedagogy Does the tool help teachers promote a more student-centered experience? Will students gain conceptual understanding or think critically? Does it deepen teachers’ pedagogical thinking?

Users must constantly reflect and self-assess, making this a helpful tool for emotional development.

Support Can students and teachers get assistance when they need it? Is it created with people of different abilities and backgrounds in mind? Is learning reinforced and extended beyond the digital experience?

The intro tutorial clearly demonstrates how to use the app. Though the app is simple to use, it could include more help in deciphering the nuances among the different emotion words.

Common Sense reviewer

Mieke VanderBorght Researcher

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Featured review by
Danielle F. , Special education instructor

Special education instructor

Positive Moods

if everyone is on board, clusters, other teachers, the program can really work

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Data Safety

How safe is this product?

Users can interact with trusted users and/or students.

Personal information is displayed publicly.

User-created content is not filtered for personal information before being made publicly visible.

Data Rights

What rights do I have to the data?

Users can create or upload content.

Unclear whether this product provides processes to access and review user data.

Unclear whether this product provides processes to modify inaccurate data.

Ads & Tracking

Are there advertisements or tracking?

Data are not shared for third-party advertising and/or marketing.

Unclear whether this product displays traditional or contextual advertisements.

Behavioral or targeted advertising is displayed.

Continue reading about this tool's privacy practices, including data collection, sharing, and security.

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