Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I shared a forty-five minute presentation on using “Cell Phones for Learning” this morning from downtown Oklahoma City to a group of leaders gathered at the AT&T Innovations Center in Washington D.C. I had met one of our AT&T external affairs representatives several weeks ago at the 2008 COSN conference, and this presentation opportunity was the result of a conversation which followed my COSN presentation on this same topic.Among other things, today I demonstrated the use of “simple text message voting” using the service Poll Everywhere, and did this using my iPhone. I also discussed how the solution provided by RAVE wireless permits students and faculty at colleges to enjoy the same functionality with polling, as well as other types of cell phone uses including alert messaging and social networking. I referenced the movie “Connected” from Abilene Christian University, which highlights their recently announced project to provide iPhones to every student and integrate them in multiple facets of learning and campus life.Because the document camera in the videoconferencing room I was using is out of commission, I connected a camcorder to my Macbook and shared my computer screen in the videoconference, using the iMovie application to show the “live video” feed of my iPhone:This wasn’t a perfect solution, since the video on my computer screen was NOT full screen. This configuration DID work, however and I was glad to share the iPhone demo by actually showing the use of the iPhone instead of just describing it for videoconference participants. Cables are available for the iPhone which support “video out” or “TV out,” but as in the case with regular iPods these cables just permit users to play iPod videos on an external video device, NOT to share and show the actual “screen” of the iPhone on an external projector or TV. Steve Jobs is able to do this during his MacWorld keynote addresses in some way, but the hardware required to make that happen is apparently not available for consumers to purchase.There are probably other applications which can be used to share a live DV-camera feed in a videoconference or just during a presentation using an LCD projector, but I don’t currently know of any. Tony Vincent showed me an application he uses to show Palm handheld screens to teachers when he’s doing workshops, last summer when we met at NECC 2007. This is a slightly fuzzy picture I took of Tony’s cool “Elmo” style flexible camera, which he uses as a document camera in presentations.Does anyone know of software applications which can be used in this way, to show a live feed from a webcam or camcorder as a full-screen image on a presenter’s computer? I’d be interested to know both Macintosh and Windows-based applications that have this functionality.I have to give full credit to Karen Montgomery for being so willing to share her knowledge, expertise, and ideas relating to cell phones in schools. Karen’s wiki site, “Think Mobile Phones for Learning” is a treasure trove of links and ideas for using cell phones inside and outside of K-12 as well as university classrooms. Thank you Karen! Technorati Tags:software, videoconference, iphone, sms, poll, polling, rave, ravewireless, acu, mobile, learning

On this day..

• Exploring differences in preteen social networking sites - 2008
• Blogs, Wikis, District Polices, Walled Gardens and the Open Web - 2008
• Sorry honey, you can't believe everything you read in your printed science textbook - 2008
• Confronting the Wicked Problems of Teaching with Technology - 2007
• Changing Schools: A conversation with Roger Schank - 2007
• Rethinking Teaching: How Online Learning Can and Should Completely Alter Your View of Education - 2007
• Seven evils of education? - 2007
• Cyberbullying and death threats - 2007
• Recording skype video and audio calls - 2007
• Messy Learning and Public Education - 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:11 pm and is filed under apple, distributed-learning, mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.