Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

The scavenger hunt, the good twin of the wild-goose chase, can be a fun way to exercise students’ creativity and problem-solving skills. This video from Howcast shows you how to put together a scavenger hunt using modern tools like cell phones and multimedia. Using smart phones, the hunters in the video solve riddles via text message, snap pictures of interesting landmarks, and dial a secret number for the next clue by solving a math problem.

While I haven’t done this myself, it looks like a fun way to fuse technology and education. This idea is swollen with educational opportunities — incorporating study questions into the clues, challenging kids to find creative solutions, or promoting collaboration and teamwork — and you can adapt it for just about any subject.

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BY BILL FERRIS

If you use the polling program Poll Everywhere, they’ve just added a few more features. Audience members can now add Tweets directly to your PowerPoint slides (you can still moderate them before displaying, of course). You can also collect donations for your fundraiser via MobileCause. And just in case you’re thinking of making the jump from the free (poll up to 30 students) option to a premium plan, they’ve recorded several short videos that explain PE’s advanced features.

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NCTIES — Tammy Worcester shows off what cell phones can do in class

BY NICK YINGLING

When I was in school, time management was an issue. Video games robbed me of my attention span and desensitized me. Then the internet came along, chaining me to a computer for hours. To top it all off, I was incredibly popular and all the coolest people wanted me to hang out and share an Orange Julius with them at the mall. Things are much better now: the video game playing is under control; the 28k modem is gone so I don’t have to spend as much time at the computer; and most of my high school acquaintances are now in jail.

What’s the latest technology threat to the health and well-being of the American teenager? Text messaging, according to this article from The New York Times. Citing the Nielsen Company, it reports that “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008.” That number, they say, is double the average from the previous year.

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Venerable note-taking app Evernote has rolled out a few new features that ought to help you and your students. You can now send Twitter messages directly into your Evernote account, use Evernote on your iPhone, or find tips on how you can use Evernote on their tips blog. You can also read the general Evernote blog for updates as they happen. All that is in addition to existing features like saving snippets websites you visit and recognizing text in pictures. -BILL FERRIS

Ron’s Evernote Tips Blog

Evernote Blog

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Post-its for the Web: MyStickies

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Whenever I see that I have a voicemail, I’m instantly demoralized. I’m not that busy, but man, am I impatient. Dial voicemail, dial in pass code, listen to robot tell me that there’s a new voicemail, dial number to listen to new voicemail, consider possible phone-related seppuku methods — you get the point.

Now, with K7 Unified Messaging, you can have your voicemails and faxes emailed directly to you. It takes a little bit of effort up front to arrange everything in a workable manner — after you set up your call-forwarding options to have your original number sent to the number K7 issues for you, you’ll pretty much be in business. The voicemails and faxes will arrive as attachments to the email that you receive. K7 will also have a private mailbox you can access directly by logging into the K7 website.

How might this be useful to you in the classroom? Its not. But whenever your central office sends a caller to your voicemail after you’ve left for the day, or if your students call to beg for an assignment extension, getting it before you go to work the next morning can be pretty handy. Also, if you end up with a bunch of messages, you might reclaim some more of your time in the morning. -NICK YINGLING

K7 Unified Messaging

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Another free service is going the pay route. Gcast sent out an email recently announcing that in order to call in, users will need to pay a $99 fee to make mobile podcasts (Gcast still hosts podcasts for free, however). Twitter and Plurk were abuzz with talk of this. While I respect Gcast’s right to make a buck on this deal (and not to go broke in the process), it’s not a “mission critical” service for me at this point, and there are other options that I can switch to that will not involve a big investment. I had only done a handful of podcasts on Gcast at this point anyway. So what are my other options?

Utterli is a nice service that allows you to post pics, video, and phone calls from your mobile phone. They have recently dropped providing international numbers, due to the expense. I’ve posted a question on the forum about their revenue stream. They do carry Google ads on their site. Since I tend to embed in other sites, that’s not a big deal. Here is a sample phone cast from Utterli. It has a player that you can embed as well.

You may know about drop.io, for “dropping” files (dead simple), but one of the “extras” they’ve added since I started using it is a call-in number. This will create a phone cast, and like Utterli, there is a conference-call option. Here’s a sample from drop.io.

There are no ads on drop.io. They do have a premium service, but I don’t know if that’ll pay the freight for all of this. My suggestions are this:

1. If you use a phone-casting service a lot, you should pay for it with a provider that looks like they can last for the long haul — there’s no sense moving around all the time. Buy yourself some peace of mind, and pony up the bucks, or have your school, a donor, etc. do it.
2. If you are conducting mobile podcast activities more intermittently, go the free route as long as it lasts. See about getting a portable digital recorder (the sound quality is better).
3. If you go the “free” route, understand that, without a revenue stream, the service won’t be free — or around at all — forever. Use the download option to “save” your work. Consider posting to your own server, or somewhere that will be in business for at least a while, for peace of mind. Both Utterli and drop.io will let you download in MP3 format. -ALICE MERCER

Utterli

drop.io

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Top 6: Using cell phones in school

Photo credit: Ocell on Flickr.

I wasn’t able to get back to the NCTIES conference today, but I’ve still got some material from Thursday. Tammy Worcester talked about a topic near and dear to my heart in her presentation “Cell Phones in the Classroom.”

Worcester began by asking us if we had our phones with us. In most social situations, this question is followed by “Please turn them off,” but she said we’d be using them during the presentation, so we should get them ready. I did, eager for an opportunity to show off my geektastic Android phone. (I kept hoping someone would notice it so I could bore them about how cool it is. Nobody noticed, which is probably for the best.)

Worcester first demonstrated GOOG-411, which Instructify has reviewed before but is worth bringing up again. It works like a free, automated 411 service. Ask for a business or business category, say your city and state, and Google will connect you for free. As a bonus, you can say “text” and Google will send you a text message with the business’ address and phone number. Slick, huh?

Speaking of Google, check out their SMS page for how to get lots of info by sending a text message. You can send a text message to 466453 (GOOGLE) to get weather updates, word definitions, movie showtimes, all kinds of stuff. For a full list of Google phone fun, no matter what sort of smart phone you use, head to  www.google.com/mobile.

If you have email on your phone, try making blog posts via email on your Blogger account (other blog services may also have this feature, but I’m unaware — let us know if they do!). On the Dashboard, if you click on Settings and Email you can set up an email address that, if you send an email to it, will post your emails directly to the blog. You’ll probably want to keep that address a secret, but Worcester set up a demo blog and gave us the address so we could try it out. If you’ve got a camera phone, it’ll also post pictures. This would be handy for a photo assignment for students — ask them to take a picture about, say, an indigenous animal and post it to the blog with comments, for example.

Worcester also pointed out the mobile podcasting service Gabcast, which lets you make a podcast directly from your cell phone. It costs around $10 for 100 minutes of recording time, which isn’t bad but you can probably find a free service somewhere online.

Finally, Worcester covered Poll Everywhere, a service that lets you set up live polls in which students (or whoever) can vote via text message. You can embed the poll results in your blog, website or PowerPoint presentation. Poll Everywhere is free so long as you have 30 or fewer poll respondents. However, those 30 people can take as many polls as you’d like to set up. Alice Mercer covered this one back in July, but once again, a friendly reminder never hurts.

All in all, it was a very informative presentation that explored what cell phones can do for education. So even if I didn’t get to show off my geek phone, I now know a few new tricks it can do. -BILL FERRIS

For more info, check out Tammy Worcester’s website

Online handouts from her NCTIES session (which technically aren’t handouts, but are technically useful)

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Photo credit: Milica Sekulic on Flickr.

Since I got an Android phone for Christmas, I’ve been yammering to anyone who will listen about how cell phones are the great technology equalizer — you can use phones to surf the internet, send email, create podcasts, share photos, as well as, you know, talk to people. Even high-end phones are much less expensive than a decent laptop, and they can fit in your pocket.

Folks in the cell phone industry feel the same way, and that’s why they’d like to see more cell phone use in schools. Matt Richtel of the New York Times deals with the issues of using phones in class in his article, Industry Makes Pitch That Smartphones Belong in Classroom.

Many educators regard students’ cell phones as mobile alert systems that let the teacher know that a student would like some detention, please. Phones also present problems ranging from cheating to increasing potential distractions in class. However, it’s hard to dispute the capabilities and cost-effectiveness of smart phones, even if the people crowing about them the loudest are doing so out of naked self-interest. The article notes that a few schools have decided to try programs in which students are issued phones for educational purposes, with positive results:

“Suzette Kliewer, the teacher who administered the Digital Millennial program at Southwest High School in Jacksonville, N.C., said the phones excited her students and made them collaborate and focus on their studies, even outside of school hours. ‘They took average-level kids and made them into honors-level kids,’ she said.

“But Ms. Kliewer also said that she spent much of her own time at night, and during weekends and holidays, monitoring the students’ phone use and occasionally disconnecting phones remotely when students broke the rules.”

Another drawback, addressed by education and technology analyst Bill Rust, is that while smart phones can do a lot, the large screens and keyboards found on computers offer an advantage that phones simply can’t overcome. If you’ve ever written a lengthy email on your phone, even if it has a keypad, you know what he means.

As the benefits of smart phones become more…well, beneficial, will schools loosen their rules on phone usage in class? What’s your school’s cell phone policy? Are you doing anything with phones in class? If that’s not allowed, are you doing anything to try to change the policy? Tell us about it in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

Industry Makes Pitch That Smartphones Belong in Classroom via the New York Times

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These kids nowadays with their dang cell phones! They got their Jonas Brothers and Miley Ray Cyrus ringtones. GET OFF MY LAWN! Sorry for the worn-out shtick complaining about kids nowadays. Tell me a better way to open on the subject of new cell-phone trends and I’ll use it.

Sick of waiting for your Amazon Kindle 2? Or maybe you ordered one, but the estimated delivery date isn’t quite so accurate — like that time my shipment of the Twilight series took an extra two days? What was that about? We may never know, but one thing I do know is that Google doesn’t want you to suffer for long without paperless media options.

We’ve written about Google Book Search before. Well now you can open up the web browser on your smart phone and point it to books.google.com/m. The books have been optimized for reading on the small screen, so now you can have 1.5 million books in your pocket. Yeah, so maybe before you could get just as many books using the library card that you kept in your pocket…but now…look, books on your phone, alright? You can read more about this over at the Inside Google Book Search blog.

Who wants to take bets that you’ll be confiscating students’ phones in the future — to see if they’ve done their required reading? -NICK YINGLING

Google Book Search Mobile

Inside Google Book Search blog

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I’ve got to say, I was disinclined to pay $9.99 to download Cram to my iPhone. Free applications and web services have spoiled me, maybe. But even though Cram is billed as an application that will help you study, it’s also true that it could conceivably be used to teach. The chief function of the application (which comes in both Blackberry and iPhone flavors) is to let you create and take simple quizzes and tests on your phone, but Cram also gives you the option of uploading the quiz you’ve created to the “Cram Web Portal,” where other users can download it to their phones. If, of course, they have the Cram application, and if they and you have signed up for a free Cram account.

As far as I can tell, Cram is the only mobile test-creation application out there, so if that’s something you or your students are really keen on, then by all means use it yourself or tell your students about it. (Maybe you teach in Washington DC, and all the kids have inherited Blackberries from their politico parents?) But I don’t see it making a big splash, especially not since there are lots of free mobile study and flash card applications and lots of free online (non-mobile) sites that let you create and take or administer tests. Anyway, I’d rather be playing reMovem. -AMANDA FRENCH

Cram BlackBerry & iPhone Study and Test Preparation Software

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Now they’ve done it. They’ve ruined my ability to forget stuff. That trusty companion—from so many Friday and Saturday nights (and Saturday and Sunday mornings, too), from so many ex-girlfriends’ birthdays/anniversaries/other clichéd relationship obligations, from so many work/school obligations—is gone for good. Now, thanks to Evernote, I have to say goodbye to my ability to forget stuff.

Its going to be a tough loss for me to handle, but I’ll just have to cope by filling the void with my new FRIGGIN’ AWESOME ABILITY TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING! Evernote lets you grab whatever you want on a website for easy reference later. While Evernote still lets you grab whole pages, why bookmark the entire page when you just want that one chunk of info? See an image, video, link, snippet of text, or whatever that you like? Highlight it and with the click of a button you’ve sent it to your Evernote.

I think it was LifeHacker where I picked up the tip to use my camera phone to take quick snapshots of business hours, ads, etc. so that I had them for easy reference, plus I’d save valuable seconds by not actually having to write things down. And I saved paper, so there’s a green spin for my personal PR, too. It’s a nice tip, but it gets annoying when I start to max out the memory on my phone. So eventually I have to waste time deciding which pics get zapped, so then I might just have to actually jot down the info somewhere after all. Someone on the Internet must have been paying attention to my plight because now I can use Evernote mobile.

With a mobile version of Evernote, I can send in those all the snapshots on my phone to have them sync up with the rest of my notes. They’ll even be searchable, as Evernote’s recognition technology can recognize the words in images. That’s some pretty next level Internetwebs technology right there.

The mobile version of Evernote is only available for your iPhone and other phones with internet capabilities, but don’t worry—in a few short years all phones will be internet ready…and shortly thereafter the machines will probably rise up against humanity. But everything will be alright. You’ll be able to easily look back and remember the full life you’ve led, all thanks to this new tool! -NICK YINGLING

Evernote

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Pencils? Check.

Notebooks? Check.

Online word processor application? Check.

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

In that spirit, here’s my top 10 new-school school supplies (all of which, by the way, are completely free).

1. OpenOffice — Why pay a bunch of money to Microsoft when you can get top-quality, MS-compatible programs for free? The OpenOffice suite packs a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, graphics software, and a database program. The open-source OpenOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do, except drain your bank account.
2. A Cell phone — Whether it’s for podcasting, conducting surveys, or staying organized, the cellular phone has a huge amount of educational potential for those who know how to use it.
3. Remember the Milk –Back in my day, I wrote inky scribbles on my palm to stay organized. Today’s kids have Remember the Milk, which can keep track of assignments, activities, chores, and all applicable due dates and priorities. It also has fewer smudges.
4. Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.
5. BibMe — Once students have found some great sources on Diigo, how do they cite them? Nobody has the time or energy to leaf through their MLA style manual to find the proper citation format for a newspaper article or whatever. If your students can muster the effort to enter a title, author, or ISBN number, BibMe will do the hard part and churn out a citation pre-formatted for the bibliography. If only the entire research paper process was this simple.
6. Google Docs — Does many of the things OpenOffice does. Google Docs also adds a collaborative element, as multiple students will be able to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
7. OpenDrive – No more excuses about hard drive crashes. OpenDrive offers 1GB of storage online. Students can sync it with files on their hard drive for backups, collaborate with friends on projects, or use it to store their ever-expanding music collection. And for the time being at least, it’s free.
8. VoiceThread — A slideshow with a soundtrack, VoiceThread lets students tell stories visually as well as textually. Easily upload video, audio, even record narration via their cell phone (I told you those things were handy), with any luck VoiceThread will replace PowerPoint.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta — If you thought Microsoft Office was expensive, check out the price tag for Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Photoshop Express Beta performs most of the photo editing functions students will need without costing a cent. They don’t even have to download anything. Now that’s express!
10. PB Wiki — Wikis are great for class projects and to cross-reference other pieces of information. And PB Wiki makes setting up a wiki a breeze, even if you don’t know a wiki from a blog.

As with any top 10 list, I had to exclude other worthy applications. Now’s your chance to tout your favorites (or to tell me what a jerk I am) in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Okay, so cell phones aren’t exactly free. However, your students probably own them already, and most of the educational uses for them won’t cost you anything to implement.

Photo credit: jgodsey on flickr

Before you confiscate your students’ phones this year, take a look at these posts to see if you can put those little devices to work in your classroom.

1. Special ed [heart] Jott
2. How to use your cell phone for education: Mobile podcasting
3. Use cell phones to poll your students
4. Gcast: We Don’t Need No Stinking Microphones!
5. How to use your cell phone for education: Pictures and video
6. Kwiry - Remember to Remember Not to Forget This

Got some more uses for phones in class? Let us know in the comments! -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Laughing Squid on flickr.

Can’t get your school district to pony up the cash for an expensive interactive whiteboard with a clicker system? Well, you can take care of the whiteboard part of that set-up here, but how to get the response system? Thanks to the folks at Poll Everywhere, all your students need is a cell phone.

• You can set up a poll with different responses.
• Then, have your participants send a text message to “41411″ with their vote (Cast ####) as a text message.
• You’ll then get results that you can share (on your Wii-remote interactive whiteboard).

Another online tool for polling using cellphones is Wiffiti, which shows results as a as a really neat visualization (shown above). Here’s how:

• Set up a screen at Wiffiti, then have participants call in
• Send a text messages to 25622 (this also spells 2LOCA).
• Start your message with the at sign ‘@’ and the screen code, for example txt: @myscrn2 Hello everybody!
• Sign your messages, txt name John Doe any time, and it will remember your name.

Wiffiti is better for open ended responses situations.

So stop confiscating your student’s cell phones, and start putting them to use in the classroom. -ALICE MERCER

You may already know about Jott, a fantastic cell phone service that will convert your voice to text. You may have wondered, “how is this useful for me besides giving me another way to make a shopping or to-do list?”

I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool. Please leave a comment below to share them.

Jott for documentation

If you are a administrator, resource specialist, or some other provider of services that demand you document your interactions and interventions with students, Jott can save you a lot of time. Here is an example: at my school, we have been implementing RTI (Response to Intervention) the new federal special education (IDEA) model. This involves a lot of documentation of interventions. I introduced my administrators to Jott. Now, after an intervention with a student, they step out to the hall, call Jott, leave a message, and voila - their message is converted to text, and sent to their email, leaving a paper record. I’ve heard of social workers, and others using it in a similar manner. It’s really great for field notes.

Jott for differentiation

One trick I recently learned is that the speech to text goes both ways on Jott. You can have RSS feeds from news sources, or your class blog to Jott, and it will turn it into an audio feed that students can phone in to Jott and hear. This is great for students who have an audio delivery accommodation on their IEP. Instructions for how to do this can be found by scrolling down to Step 6 Mobilecast. -ALICE MERCER

[UPDATE 1/14/09: Jott will drop all their free services as of February 2, 2009.]

Slideshare on using Jott for RTI documentation

Cellphones in Learning blog

Cell phones in learning wiki

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