Mobile Education...Take a class on your cell phone!

Currently if you have a cell phone you can do the following...read a book, write a book, podcast, Jott notes, create a live TV or radio broadcast, check your google calendar, research information (GOOGL), surf the web (.mobi sites), create a blog, photoblog, videoblog, and now you can----take a class on your cell phone! Yes! No need to have Internet access or a home computer anymore to take distance learning classes (and no snail mail for video-based distance education). Japan is the first country (that I know of) to start doing this. In a recent USA Today article it describes how students can take an entire course via their cell phone. Currently the curriculum is limited to Enhanced podcasts (made primarily from PowerPoint) of course lectures. While this is a limited example, I have a feeling it will be expanding quickly into many different phone services and across the world.

This has potential for K-12 education; from dealing with absent students (they can take responsibility for loading videos of the class activities into their cell phone) to opening up education to different forms of teaching outside of the traditional classroom setting. For example, students who are studying about Business could be watching a lecture on how to start a new business and be told in the lecture to go into a local store, using their cell phone, and record an interview (it could even be a live broadcast--Talkshoe or QIK-- that other students in the same class could be listening to) with the owner or salespeople. It could be a "real world" LIVE classroom! I know this is a ways off, but an interesting concept.

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.