Monday, March 10, 2008

Live with...Create Live TV or Radio Broadcasts from your Cell!

No more bulky equipment needed for live broadcasting...no laptops or external microphones or camcorders!!! You can use a free site called QIK to create a live video broadcast from your cell phone over the Internet (it can post directly on your blog in real time). The first thing I thought of when I heard of this site (Thanks to Pat Sine) was that it would be really easy to create student television stations with Live broadcasts that people could subscribe to, or that could be posted directly on the school website. About 7 years ago I started a student television station with my high schoolers, and wow, it was difficult. Each broadcast was painstakingly slow. We did it over the cable line using televisions and some of the classrooms did not have cable so some students never got to see the broadcasts. Additionally we had to render the broadcasts and upload to the Internet if we wanted parents and community members to see them. It took the focus away from the content and onto the tool (which I prefer not to do when working with technology). QIK would be a great solution for many of my television station problems. Set up a blog, and let students use their cell phone camcorders to do live broadcasts. They could also cover breaking stories in real time around the school or community. QIK is currently in it's alpha stage, so you do have to request an account, and they are only working with Nokia phones (but QIK claims that they will soon be adding new cell phones to their accounts).


If you want to do live radio broadcasts from your student's cell phones, you can do those easily with Talkshoe. Talkshoe allows anyone to create their own radio program for free over the Internet. Talkshoe is also great for live conferencing, since it allows many people the ability to "call in" to the live broadcast and participate. You can also set up your Talkshoe account to record the broadcasts, so that people who miss the live feed can still hear the show. The other nice aspect of this resource is that you are given one phone number with your channel that works with any phone, so any student's cell phone can actually do the live broadcast (great for those "breaking news" stories on the go!). Talk shoe also has some privacy options (nice for schools) and no advertising.

3 comments:

comfortably souther said...

Have you seen this yet?

Exerpt from: http://weblogg-ed.com/
"Students Pay a Price (Literally) for Cell Phone Ban"

Almost all of them had cell phones as well, phones which are banned in school. (The policy is that if you are caught with a cell phone in school, it’s taken away and it can only be returned to a parent who comes to pick it up on a Friday.) I hooked most of them when I took out my phone and had them ask me a question that they thought I wouldn’t know, which after a few more colorful attempts ended up being “What’s the population of Spain?” They watched as I sent a text message “Spain population” to 46645 (GOOGL) and get the answer back about 10 seconds later. Amazement ensued.

What an incredible use of a cell phone and incredible technology offered by Google.

Liz Kolb, Ph.D. said...

Fantastic! Thanks for Sharing. I think we just need to see more examples and models like this and the "ban" on cell phones in learning may soon be reconsidered!

Anonymous said...

This sounds like a great idea, how do you regulate if the student is infact responding to your message or texting their friends? Was there any additonal cost to you for using your phone in this manner? Do you already pay for text messaging service?
Cassie

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