Techlearning blog

It is amazing to think the cell phones many of us use daily have more computing power than the computers used by NASA in the 1960s and early 1970s in the Apollo space program which successfully landed people on the moon for the first time. In many schools, cell phones are regarded as an annoying distraction rather than a tool for learning. Cell phones, however, need to be recognized as well as utilized as creative learning tools both in and outside of the classroom.

Liz Kolb's presentation "Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools" was one of several oustanding sessions I enjoyed this week during the start of the free K-12 Online Conference. Liz opened my eyes to multiple uses for cell phones for learning and assessment. I am perhaps most enthused to encourage learners to use cell phones as mobile recording devices for classroom podcasts, using websites like Gabcast. This past Friday, I accompanied a group of elementary students to a local history museum in Oklahoma and helped them record "in the field" reports about different artifacts and items they saw in the museum. The digital story I created with their recorded voices and captured digital pictures was short, but it represents a revelation for me personally. To think everyone with a cell phone now has a mobile tool for classroom podcasting! Wow. TIME is always in short supply in the classroom, so the ability to use a cell phone for "distributed podcast recording" like this is truly remarkable. I'm eager to share these methods for "in the field" podcast recording with more teachers here in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Hopefully the digital stories we created this past week using VoiceThread as well as Garageband (the previous links are to the actual versions of the stories we created) will inspire others to create similar digital products.

In some respects, many learners in our schools seem to be living in a "desert of creative publication" when it comes to student work. Hopefully, access to free tools like Gabcast, Voicethread, and other tools which "minimize the clicks" required to create digital stories will allow even more learners to safely share their voices on the global stage of the Internet and receive constructive feedback from peers as well as others sitting in the virtual audience for their presentations.

To learn more about how cell phones can be used in powerful and appropriate ways to support learning, check out Liz Kolb's blog "From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Schools" in addition to watching her excellent 70 minute presentation for K12Online07.