The Strength of Weak Ties

Everyone participates. Everyone contributes. Leveraging the power of digital networks to connect people, resources and ideas to drive creativity and innovation forward...and actually accomplish something!

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Cell Phone Survey Says....

One of our health teachers just the other day did a tech survey with his new kids (health is a semester course and we are just starting second semester) and asked them what they could use cell phones for in his class. Here are their responses:
-take notes
-record lectures
-use the calculator
-take photos
-calendar/scheduling
-access the Web
More survey information: 50 kids taking the survey, 45 had cell phones, 30 of those had photo capability.
It won't be long before some of our teachers will be having kids use their cell phones to podcast using Evoca, which enables users to call in a voice recording and post it to the Web. We also have a fairly big digital storytelling program that I envision taking steps towards creating DST movies specifically with cell phone imagery.
However, they'll probably have to do these things outside of school...we ban cell phones during the day.
A telling quote from the discussion board of the same teacher's class from a student who gets it:

"Everyone always says that we are the future, well why keep future technology from the people who will be in the future."

Exactly.

posted by David @ 7:53 PM  

3 Comments:

  • At 10:38 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    David,
    As I was reading the results of the survey a thought came to my mind. Who needs to buy new technology for schools when the kids already come with it. If you can do all those things on a cell phone, well what's next? What a great elective: Cell Phone Movies ( I remember an article about this not to long ago).

    Your final quote though is even more telling. Do we do our kids a disservice by teaching the future generations the same way we taught the past. Change is hard, however we need to start thinking about how the "new" generation learns and adapt to it.
    Brian

     

  • At 1:32 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Thanks for letting your readers know about how easy it is to Podcast by phone using Evoca. We agree - the phone is the most available digital, phone-to-web recording device in the world, when using it with Evoca. We auto-generate RSS code for every member profile and group. New users can also make their very first Evoca recording and instantly sign-up even if they're not online simply by calling one of our 10 U.S. or 10 international numbers. Here's the Chicago number, for example: 312-604-7084. As a blogger you can add an EvocaMic - our in-browser recorder, to invite audio as well as text comments that you can choose to post on your blog. With our Virtual Voice Mail, you can get your own local phone number or 800# to invite other people to leave voice comments, even if they aren't yet Evoca members. Recordings to your EvocaMic or Virtual Voice Mail come in first in private mode so you can choose which ones to post. Feel free to leave me a voice comment directly through my Evoca profile - as you can through any member's profile. I'm at www.evoca.com/murem. Passing the mic, Murem

     

  • At 2:53 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    I've used Gcast (http://www.gcast.com) to do this same thing. I love it.

    I envision students being roving reporters with the ability to talk about what's going on in the world around them from anywhere at anytime.

     

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home