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

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

Subjects & skills

Grades 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.

6–12

Great for:

SEL

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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.

Rating Details

Overall Rating

Engagement Is the product stimulating, entertaining, and engrossing? Will kids want to return?

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

Pedagogy Is learning content seamlessly baked-in, and do kids build conceptual understanding? Is the product adaptable and empowering? Will skills transfer?

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

Support Does the product take into account learners of varying abilities, skill levels, and learning styles? Does it address both struggling and advanced students?

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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The Mood Meter

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Use with Caution Basic evaluation