PowerPoint for Cell phones!

A really neat idea created by Doug Belshaw is to convert your PowerPoint to a mobile Ready device such as a cell phone. Doug has posted a really easy tutorial on his blog. I would only extend the tutorial by saying that once you convert the slides, you can use an easy free uploading site such as cellfish to send them to your cell phone. You can also use this tutorial to convert your slides to iPod-ready format for itunes. It's a great way to give students more access to class PowerPoint presentations (they can study the slides while they are in line at McDonalds). Students may also be more motivated to create a "mobile" PowerPoint to share with their peers and community members. Great Idea! You could also use this concept to create charts and graphs to be read on cell phones. Students could collect data and graph them in PowerPoint. Then they could export the graph/chart as a jpg from PowerPoint and upload it to their cell phone. They could also share their charts/graphs with others (for example if they were in charge of presenting about the 2008 election, students could put the data into a chart and send it out to students the night before the presentation so their classmates can start to ponder the issues in presentation the next day).

Cellfish...Easy Uploading to Cell Phone from Web

I came across a resource called Cellfish, where you can easily upload just about any file type (.mov, .jpg, .wmv...etc) to your cell phone! This is a really easy way to upload unique ring tones to cell phones. Learning connection ideas...

1) Students can create content-based ringtones such as a rap about elements in the periodic table for Chemistry or a jingle about a math concept (such as fractions) using Audacity or Garageband. They can then upload them to their cell phones using Cellfish. They can share their ringtones with each other so that they can program different ringtones for different cell phone actions (such as a rap about Calcium can be a ring tone for one friend and a rap about sodium can be a ring tone for another friend). Thus every time their cell phone rings they have an instant review!

2) Students can upload their video projects (exported from iMovie or MovieMaker as .mov or .wmv files) to their parents' cell phones so they can instantly view the projects (especially if they do not have internet access at home).

3) Teachers can assign videos to watch for homework (such as a PBS or NBC special) rather than taking class time to watch a video by having students upload the videos to their cell phones to watch. While not all videos are in QuickTime formate, more and more are being compressed for the ipod or QuickTime.