The Mood Meter
Well-designed tool encourages kids to reflect on and manage emotions
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The Mood Meter
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.
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