Mobile Phone Video Challenge...Film on the Fly

Yesterday I ran across a twitter post by Hall Davidson about a very interesting mobile phone video challenge sponsored by a local PBS station in California called Film on the Fly. On February 7th, 2009 the contest will send out a text message challenge (story) to anyone who signs up and ask them to create a mobile video of the topic in 20 hours or less! I myself cannot wait to participate and SEE the results! Of course this contest has me thinking about how classroom teachers could do this with their own students.

Since many students do not have camcorders in their cell phones, they could give a video or still photo option for the challenge. For example I could see a social studies teacher texting out part of a famous speech (such as "I have a dream") and asking their students to take pictures/video of things in the community that represent the major arguments or points in the speech. Students could take pictures of children of all races/creeds playing together to represent the "dream fulfilled" and at the same time could take pictures of signs that say "restricted" to represent the "unfulfilled dream".

The free resources that teachers could use to make this happen would include...
Storage Sites for the Media
drop.io to store all the media students collect. Since drop.io is password protected and can take all types of media it is perfect for this type of assignment.

Text Message Blast to Students
Sites such as txtBlaster, Textmarks, or Sendible would be great for creating an easy text message "blast" out to cell phones of the assignment.

Audio Blast to Students
If the teacher was worried about using text messaging because of potential charges on student's phones (although many do have unlimited text messaging now), they could use an audio blast with resources such as Dial2do or AbbyMe.