Using email to blog to support learning

I had a fruitful session with a placement manager at Sheffield College yesterday - we discussed what she wanted the learners to be able to do:
1. Easily upload pictures and videos that they had taken with the XDA Flints or their own phones to one place so they could view them in class or in their own time.
2. Comment on each other's pictures and videos
3. Rate them

I was going to use FriendFeed but this only allows you to upload from your own email address, rather than providing you with a generic email address that everyone can use, so we decided to go with Vox.com which has a generous upload limit.

I discovered another great thing about Vox - you can generate additional email addresses to send stuff to. With each email address that you generate, you can add specific tags, so learners could email to one address and have their pictures automatically tagged with certain key words. This will become very useful if you want pictures to be searchable by assignment for instance.

Of course learners can also go online and add additional tags to the photos and videos, as well as the comments.

One thing we haven't yet worked out is the best way to socially share PowerPoint. Slideshare took its time and I wonder if anyone can point me to another good PowerPoint sharing site?

The downside to Vox is that I couldn't update it through an RSS feed. Only certain other blogs are supported.

I guess the one ultimate site that we want to use hasn't yet been invented!

BT 1571

I used to find the BT 1571 service handy for recording to my home phone while I was out and about, then picking up the mp3 from the website (kind of like a poor man's Gabcast or Ipadio). However, on checking it recently, they've removed this feature from their website! Boo hiss!
Wonder if anyone out there knows of other phone to web recording services?

Great social use of blog sites

I'd suggested to a tutor that they set up a blog site and give out the email to blog address to the learners so they could all add photos and reflections on one blog site. We're going to try this from Sept with a group so I'll update my blog later in the year with the outcomes of this.
I was chatting to some friends in a kitchen today and people are already using this function in their everyday lives: after a wedding, the bride and groom have given out a blog/photo site email address so that everyone can upload their photos of the event to one site for everyone else to look at. That's a great idea! And the fact that this is becoming everyday practice is all the more reason for us teachers to be adopting it in teaching, don't you think?

Reflections on PSP

Video captured by PSP by Ron Mitchell and myself at a recent (MoLeNET) Sheffield College event about the use of PSPs in education.

Audio is a bit quiet, so turn up the volume.

http://tinypic.com/m/4syw75/2

I had a play on the DSi!

Went along to a friend's bbq last night and the little girl that was there had a DSi, so of course I pinched it and sat in a corner by myself to explore the new toy. Well, actually, I asked the 8 year old to show me how to work the camera etc because it was much faster to learn it that way.
I had a blast with the photo editing functions - you could really have fun with it. And I can see the educational possibilities too. You ask learners to point the camera and take a picture of a kitchen counter you had set up, and you ask them to indicate the areas of risk with some graffiti. If I had another DSi, I would have explored the sending of pictures back and forth. This would have enabled discussion using Pictochat on whether the learner/s had been successful in assessing the risks. That's just one example I've thought up. It's a similar type of activity to using the Wii for identifying risks (http://inclusivity.rsc-yh.ac.uk/case_study?id=139).
I thought the sound recording and editing functions were equally fun - not sure how useful this is but it's great to be able to record and then slow down or speed up the sound or change the pitch. I was already impressed with my Chinese Coach game for the DS as it allowed me to record my voice and play it back together with the correct pronunciation to compare. I'm sure the DSi and future games will be even more creative. Look forward to getting a DSi!

Some new fav tools

Thanks to various colleagues who have shown me these great tools recently:

http://splashurl.net
This takes the tinyurl concept and goes one further - it generates a large qr code on a web page as well so that at a presentation, people can simply point their phones at the screen to capture the is.gd url! For a recent workshop, I uploaded content onto my web space, created qr codes for them and at the workshop, people simply pointed their phones at the screen to start downloading PowerPoints and other files on to their phones. This works for video files, mp3s etc!
One way for tutors to quickly upload materials to the web and provide a url for that resource is to email it to their posterous account (http://posterous.com).

That brings me on to http://posterous.com, which various colleagues already use. This is a blog site and then some: you can attach any type of file to your email post to the site and it will be there for others to download. It has the usual rss feed options so if a learner has subscribed to your feed, then he/she could look at their feedreader on the phone and simply click to download the resource to the phone! Wow!

That brings me on to http://protopage.com or http://protopage.com/mobile if you are on a mobile device. Lovely mobile feed aggregator that displays well on a small screen device.

http://etherpad.com
This takes the idea of a wiki and makes it even more functional - it allows up to 8 synchronous editors, all colour-coded so you know who typed what. If you need more than 8, you can always create another etherpad and cross-reference them by urls.
AND it doesn't need logins. You simply type http://etherpad.com/ and a word you like at the end of the url and voila, you can create an etherpad with that url! Of course it helps to use something unique so it's harder for someone to accidentally come across your etherpad.
At a recent Digital 20/20 event, people were really excited by this tool and we started co-writing a story on the screen with hilarious results. If only they made a mobile version...this could be the new instant messaging tool.

OneNote Mobile
This is on my new Windows Mobile phone. I can type text, add a voice recording and insert a picture or take a picture and it's automatically inserted into the page on the mobile. It has great potential for gathering multimedia evidence for competencies. Haven't yet worked out how to aggregate all the files that make up the OneNote on the mobile device into one file though, but watch this space...
I started with using Notes on the phone as I could send the .pwi file to other people using the splashurl technique above. OneNote allows photos to be added to the page as well so is definitely more functional, but I need to play around with zipping up the assets that make up the OneNote file on the mobile device before we can truly exploit it.

Making jpeg quizzes

For some reason, I made these videos and never blogged about them. Luckily, Dave Foord has so it saves me having to say anymore: http://tinyurl.com/dfjpegquiz

A tutor came across Dave's blog and ran with the idea to produce a set of 92 quiz cards. Superb!
http://tinyurl.com/tesljpegquiz

Hope to gather more resources like this in future.

Regarding transfer of these files to a learner's mobile phone:

1. If the phone has a memory card, this is easily done through a usb memory card reader.

2. The learner may have a cable to attach the phone to a PC for file transfers

3. Bluetooth is a possibility but it would take a while to move 92 cards across, unless the phone is paired via Bluetooth with the computer.

4. If the phone has a data contract, then downloading the cards is a possibility, or even viewing them online.

With regards to doing the same thing using PowerPoint, as Dave Foord has pointed out, you have to rename the first 9 slides as slide01 (zero one) to slide09. My only worry is that people try to cram too much into a slide and so it won't work on a small screen. The beauty of Paint is that it's clunky and that keeps things in perspective, enabling the creation of jpeg quizzes that work on a small screen! If using PowerPoint, remember to change the size of the slide to better suit the portrait format of most phones. Not crucial since the learner can just turn their phone on its side, but navigation is sometimes easier when the phone is the right way up!