Mitra
Insightful, minimalist app gets students tracking emotions and values
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Mitra
Pros: Simplistic design, along with easily customizable and uncomplicated graphs, make this a worthy tool for tracking daily data.
Cons: Students may lose interest since there's no ability to share their results with others and little built-in explanation of the content.
Bottom Line: A practical tool to use in combination with discussion about emotional intelligence and character development.
If you're looking for a tool to supplement discussion around emotional health, look no further. Let your students track what matters to them, build awareness by encouraging daily reflection, and gain insight into how their values and feelings relate. From a curriculum standpoint, Mitra could easily complement a lesson on journaling, charting, or using daily logs.
From a character-development standpoint, Mitra is wonderful for emotion identification, emotion regulation, and values identification in high school students. Help your students understand the cause and effect of daily social interactions and how it affect their own emotional well-being. Ask your students to complete an assignment on things that are important to them and identify how those values affect their daily, weekly, or monthly feelings. Host preventative, restorative discussions or mediation between peers with students who repeatedly use this app. Have students dive deeper and analyze their emotions when values are either infringed upon (for example, a friend spills a deep secret) or supported (for example, an upperclassman asks a new student to sit at their lunch table). Use similarities and commonalities among groups of students to chart and graph class-wide data to develop social awareness, critical-thinking skills, and a sense of belonging.
Mitra first asks you to select three to eight of your most deeply held values and then record your day by charting -- on a scale from 0 to 10 -- how much you lived your values and felt emotions throughout the day. After logging these scores, a prompt asks you to journal personal reflections while displaying those daily scores. Finally, a screen pops up thanking you for logging your values and emotions with a reminder to stop back again the next day; you also can set daily notifications for a specified time to make sure you don't forget to log daily data.
If you wish to change or edit any of the emotions or values you originally chose, the app allows for this customization. Click on My Values or My Emotions to edit, change, or add more than 10 distinct personal options. Mitra also offers an Insights tab, which allows you to see graphs of your own data. You can choose to highlight one or more of the values and emotions and make comparisons. The graphs built into this app are interactive and change as you tap each value or emotion. Lastly, Mitra includes an analytics screen, which automatically calculates baseline and average scores to see if your current scores are trending in positive or negative directions.
Mitra is incredibly useful as a daily journal that allows for independence and personal reflection. Students are able to use their own lives to engage in critical-thinking skills in areas of character development. While the original curriculum was not intended for students, the overall app could be helpful in character-development training and self-assessment as students begin to make the connection between emotion management and living their own values-based intentions.
However, there are still some things to consider. Students may require some assistance in generalizing and transferring the skills from data tracking on an app to real-life scenarios. The app provides little explanation about the content (for example, definitions of emotions) or assistance in interpreting graphs. It would also be great if users could engage socially with others and share their graphs with a group of classmates; Mitra currently doesn't allow for social sharing. That said, this is a delightfully minimalist way to pause and reflect upon daily moments and how those moments affect emotions by relating experiences to personal values.
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