http://www.eastasiacenter.net/apcampbell/xml/rss.xml
My ESL colleagues could get a real charge from this kind of technology. It keys into their habits (text messaging, cell phones, picture phones).
I'm really interested in learning more about how to use mobile phone technology with my students, as everyone of them has a phone with digital camera, email capability, and most with limited internet access. Some quick ideas:
- I could record a 'good morning message' on Audacity and send it out to their mobile phones a few hours before class, seeding their minds with key vocab and questions to get them thinking. I could even give them the warm-up conversation exercise so that they are already speaking when I walk in the classroom.
- Using their mobile phones, students take a weekly picture according a given theme, record a 30 sec message describing the picture and why they took it, and have them post to their blogs via telephone. I could then aggregate weekly thematic posts via RSS, link to Flickr tags, and have students find and comment on similar photos. I can't help but think of Rudolf's EFL Flickr project when I write that.
- Once Skype gets hooked up on mobile phones, students could be assigned partners from abroad to chat with, completing some information gap type exercises, in addition to finding out more about cultural differences and similarities. Imagine free international telephone calls! We could even do real time scavenger hunts where the foriegn counterparts have all the clues and frequent telephone calls are necessary to complete the assignment. You could even get them using GPS technology. With the potential for free video streaming someday, perhaps our students can actually sit in their classrooms and walk into a real American diner and order a burger and fries....and not have to eat them!
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