Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Easy and Free mobile classroom website resources and ideas

I have run across two new FREE sites for developing mobile-friendly webpages. Both are mobile-web friendly and easy to navigate on any basic cell phone with web access (of course, check your plans for mobile web fees).

First, Mobilemo has both a free account and premium account. Mobilemo allows you to use their templates (which does include lots of options) to create your mobile website. Mobilemo also has some features that the other mobile webpage builders do not often have, such as the ability to create mobile polls and surveys, mobile forms, private mobile options such as uploading and retrieving files from a personal briefcase that only you can access on your mobile phone, ability to post mobile comments and add to a mobile guest book. There are some nice "moderator" features for the teacher in charge of the mobile site, such as restricting comments, or turning off the guest book.


UBIK is a site similar to Mobilemo. UBIK has many more templates, but it does not have the ability to create polls/surveys. UBIK does have a general comments pages, which you could turn into a guest book. I do think the UBIK site is easier to navigate and use, but more limited in what you can do, compared to Mobilemo.

Classroom Applications:
Here are a few ways these free mobile website developers could be integrated into classroom learning.
1) Classroom Mobile Website Run by the Students
Because these sites are template-based students as young as 2nd grade could easily develop the content for the site. Students could take turns adding information to the classroom or school mobile website.

2) Activism Project
Students could engage in an activist-type project for their classroom by developing the mobile website around a particular cause (related to the class curriculum, such as animal rights) and asking people to take the polls, complete forms, comment, and write in the Guest Book (which could become a digital petition list).

3) Business Advertising
While a business class could create an entire mobile campaign around a product (or even better team with a local community business to do this), another business type venture for the school would be to advertise upcoming shows and events such as the Spring musical.

3 comments:

Sarah Sutter said...

Liz, I can't thank you enough for making your NECC presentation interactive even for those of us far away. I actually got to play with the tools from Maine! Great stuff. I'm definitely hooking my flickr to my blog like that at some point. Love it.

NECC said...

Thank you Sarah
So glad you could participate! Always good to hear that the presentation was useful (of course I don't usually get a response from Maine when I am presenting in Texas!).
Liz

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