No I’m not talking about using cell phone for furtive texting but other educational purposes. Since most of our students have cell phones is there a way to leverage them for educational purposes (and texting just might be useful). I’ve been playing with my own phone since I discovered that it has bluetooth and I can connect it with my netbook, my Modbook and other computers and exchange files.
Most newer phones have at cameras that can take stills and videos. There are some obvious uses for pictures and videos. You could have students keep a video diary. You could have students record video of each other speaking a foreign language, performing a task, or interviewing each other.
You might also give students a real reason to text in larger classes. Using AIM you can have students text questions during class. You could keep an AIM window open on a laptop to monitor questions. Or you might use AIM to poll students, kind of like using clickers but with more open responses allowed.
Now to review some of the literature and find out what others have done or are doing with cell phones…
I discovered a cool tool today on my Modbook. It’s Automator, an OS X tool to automate processes. It’s really a GUI interface for creating scripts. Within minutes I created a script to batch resize photos and another to take image files and create a PowerPoint slideshow with one image per slide. Cool!
Here’s a link to the archive file containing both scripts.