The Mood Meter

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

Learning rating

Community rating

Based on 1 review

Privacy rating

Expert evaluation by Common Sense

Grades

6–12

Subjects & Topics

English Language Arts, Health & Wellness, Social & Emotional Learning

Price: Paid
Platforms: Android

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

Cons: Built-in inspirational images and text are limited, so users will need to create their own independently from the app.

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

The Mood Meter could be part of an entrance ticket or homeroom activity to invite kids to assess and share how they're doing. There's no capability to create multiple user accounts, so kids will need to have their own device 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.

Help students compose a list of quotes and strategies to customize the app. What feels inspirational? What kinds of content help shift one's mood? 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.

The Mood Meter is an app for analyzing, tracking, and monitoring mood. Students plot their moods on a color-coded chart filled with different words that describe a wide range of feelings. After browsing the plot and selecting a mood, students use 150 characters to describe what caused that mood. Next, they choose Stay, which records the feedback and ends the exercise, or Shift to generate a strategy that might help shift their mood. Strategies include images, quotes, coping strategies, and a list of the student's past descriptions linked to positive moods.

If students sign in with their own account, they can track their moods over time. The history section offers a breakdown of the user's moods. Kids can adjust the chart for a particular date range, and browse individual entries. They can also share their mood history and "reasons why" list, or follow others by sending out invitations to a friends' email address.

To see how this tool works, watch our video overview of The Mood Meter.

With The Mood Meter, kids explore their own emotional triggers in a visually appealing, engaging tool for tracking emotions. Built by prominent researchers on emotional intelligence, it has simple features clearly included to maximize the user's self-reflection and assessment. Exploring the grid of words is surprisingly fun as dots expand and contract with a tap. Even the visual metaphor alone is interesting, since you can learn something from the spectrum of words and how they relate to one another. And the definitions help kids expand their vocabulary as well as determine if they've picked the right description for their mood. Unfortunately, some of the built-in quotes and strategies are a little basic, so kids may want to supplement with their own ideas. 

The emotion history 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. The Mood Meter can stand on its own as a simple exercise in self-reflection, but it could be even more powerful with guidance from a professional who could help fill kids' toolboxes with high-quality, highly personalized coping strategies as well as comforting words and images.

Learning Rating

Overall Rating
Engagement

The simple interface provides a highly customizable, visually appealing user experience. Because it encourages personal reflection, it's highly relevant and personally affecting.

Pedagogy

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

Support

The intro tutorial clearly demonstrates how to use the app. Definitions help guide kids in deciphering the nuances among the different emotion words.

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Privacy Rating

Data Safety How safe is this product?

  • Users can interact with trusted users.
  • Personal information can be 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 data for authorized users.

Ads & Tracking Are there advertisements or tracking?

  • Personal information is not shared for third-party marketing.
  • Unclear whether this product displays traditional or contextual advertisements.
  • Personalised advertising is displayed.

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

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