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!

my thoughts on the iPhone

At the risk of being the only person in the world not enamoured with the iPhone, I'd like to share my thoughts on my recent trial of it.
A bit of background first: I've been using a Windows-based touchscreen mobile phone since 2006 and have had mobile Internet access all this time. I am also very into Apple-based products so am not out to 'diss' it for the sake of it. I am merely making a comparison of my experience between the phones and their usability.
I can understand people's enthusiasm for browsing the web by touching the screen if they have never done this before. And of course the pinch technology to zoom in and out and navigate around the page is very nice. Plus the screen is very bright and clear (all Apple products are outstanding on this!)
What would I miss if I moved to the iPhone?
1. The use of a stylus to tap on the virtual keyboard, although you can buy them for the iPhone but there's nowhere to store it on the device. Even with my skinny fingers, I struggled to get the letters right.
2. Predictive text. This speeds up my typing immensely on my HTC phone.
3. Being able to copy and paste. This surprised and annoyed me on the iPhone, the lack of a 'clipboard' feature!
4. Not being able to select text to delete. On the iPhone, you have to move the cursor and then tap the backspace key like mad to delete text! Why?!!
5. Arrows on the keyboard to move across to edit text. Okay, the magnifying glass thingy to help you move the cursor looks nice, but it just doesn't get to the crux of what I want to do , quickly. Overdesigned, if you ask me.
6. Being able to use multiple applications at once and copy and paste between them.
7. I felt rsi coming on as I hovered my finger over the virtual keyboard. There's something less assuring about the keyboard compared to the HTC, and that's saying something since the Touch is very slow to respond, and still I prefer it! Kind of like typing on a pc keyboard; I like the keys to respond and therefore prefer typing on a full keyboard to a laptop keyboard. With the iPhone, i didn't get a sense of having pressed with the right amount of pressure...
8. Apparently the iPhone doesn't have a 'file manager' type application so you cannot choose a file to upload, for instance, if you were using Moodle or some other website and wanted to choose a picture to upload? No chance. Does anyone know any different?
9. No support for Flash on websites.
10. I turned on Bluetooth on the iPhone and on my HTC. My HTC found the iPhone. The iPhone was still searching...I had to use my HTC to prompt a pairing. Paired it, but couldn't send a photo across to the iPhone. In any case, I'm not sure what you can Bluetooth from the iPhone. I went to Pictures and looked at the options there: Use as wallpaper, email photo, assign to contact. Hmmmm. Anyone have any experience of Bluetoothing something from and to the iPhone?
11. I couldn't transfer anything to the iPhone on iTunes since it belonged to someone else and iPhones will only pair with one iTunes at a time. I didn't feel like wiping out Tim Brophy(O2)'s music library, so wasn't able to transfer files across to test things out. Windows-mobile phones allow you to guest access and to explore the files on the device. I couldn't use the iPhone as a 'usb stick'.

I guess it's all in the applications - maybe I should ask this little fella to write some for me: http://tinyurl.com/brwvrk

Another time, I'll add a post about what I DO use the HTC phone for, maybe it will give people a few ideas for using it with other learners who are being equipped with the same...

Nintendo DS Lite, Pictochat, Handheld Learning 2008

My current favourite m-toy is the Nintendo DS Lite. I received mine after signing up early for the 2008 Handheld Learning conference (what will they give away next year? PSP?), proceeded to buy a few games for it to get to know its functionality. Games like My Word Coach include opportunities for you to write the letters to fill in blanks, which is a great bit of interactivity. I also have My Chinese Word Coach so I can practice my Chinese handwriting and word recognition. It's great!

Apart from the touch screen, My Chinese Word Coach includes opportunities to listen to pronunciations and to record them and compare your recording with the original. This gets my thumbs up for a well-thought out programme.

The Pictochat function is another great feature of the DS. It's like having a chat room in your hands. So long as there is another DS or DS Lite nearby, you can go into a chat room and draw or type to your heart's content. Not only can you send your message to the other person, you can pull down a previous message, add to it or erase part of it and then send it back! See video below:

This has some potential for simple gap-fill using words or formulae. We used Pictochat to great effect at the Handheld Learning conference: the friendly banter meandered from what the speakers were saying to trying to find ways to communicate where we were in the big hall. I met some new people through this and it's certainly a great way to reduce isolation in a big conference such as HHL2008. (pix of Chat Room B)

At another session, storytelling came to the fore when I drew a hand coming out from one side of the screen. Someone else drew another hand coming out from the other side of the screen. I then drew a croissant being thrown by the new hand towards mine. A third person (mention no names http://tinyurl.com/markvanhooft - scroll down to see his entry about my presentation at the HHL2008) drew his hand coming up and stealing my croissant! The story continued but I won't bore you with the details. This was not only a great ice breaker but allowed us to be creative, inventive and to show our personalities with drawings as well as handwriting and text.

During my presentation at the HHL2008, I also mentioned the R4 card to people. This is a Flash cart with a micro-DS memory card preloaded with Moonshell (it's like an alternative operating system for the DS that will run from the memory card). Another similar card is the M3 but I haven't got that one.

I put jpegs, .txt files, mp3 files and ogg videos on to the micro-SD card. I put that into the R4 card and insert that into the DS. The DS turns on with Moonshell and I can then look at the photos, view the videos, read the txt files as an ebook. I can even play .nds games! I converted a video using the Moonshell tools (http://forums.maxconsole.net/showthread.php?t=18663) which saved it as a .dpg file for the DS.

The R4 card retails for about £20 and comes with a 1Gb micro-SD card and preloaded with Moonshell, so all you need to do is to drop in your media files. Photos do have to be 256x192 pixels. Video screen size didn't seem to matter too much.

If you want to go on the Internet with your DS, or design your web site to be DS friendly, read this interesting review: http://tinyurl.com/4bhga6. Note that "Sites designed for greater accessibility will also tend to work better. " So maybe we can use the DS as a web accessibility diagnostic tool ;-)

So if you have Nintendo DS's in your institutions, why not stretch its use a little further. I look forward to hearing stories of how people have used Pictochat in classrooms, and how they have used the DS as a media player!

My slides from the HHL2008 can be downloaded from here: http://xlearn.co.uk/handheld/ls_ppt_hhl2008.ppt

Others can be found by going to http://handheldlearning.co.uk/

And congratulations to Chris Tansey of Wyke College for winning one of the awards at the HHL!

Weird technology fixes

Ok, this must be the weirdest technology fix I have come across to date that works. It's almost like asking someone to sneeze three times and the thing that wasn't working, will work again!

Basically, my HTC Touch on Windows Mobile 6 was refusing to let me install anything on it, either by download or via Activesync. I was getting very frustrated and had this problem for months.

I finally came across this article that solved the problem:

http://tinyurl.com/6chx7n

Anyone have any weird fixes like that to share? If any of the MoLeNET colleges are using the HTC phones and have this issue, this fix may be useful to you so TAG IT at once!

QR codes

Having heard about QR codes from James Clay, Carl Smith of London Met etc, I thought I'd have a go at it myself.
I couldn't Bluetooth the software to my phone, no matter how I tried (the .jar file went across but not the .jad file), but with my Sony Ericsson, I managed to transfer the .jad and the .jar file on to the memory card via a card reader and install the software on the phone that way. I used the kaywa reader (http://reader.kaywa.com/) and made my own codes using their online facility (http://qrcode.kaywa.com/)

I think QR codes are going to be great on open day - if you provide the students with the phones/kit to read them, and then have a booth to help students get them on their own phones (which in the long run means you can use QR codes around the college more) - will try this out in Sept 08.

Agree with James re reducing the need to type out URLs etc on a phone to access a website, but I think simply using it for location-based information is useful, and if you provide students with the means to make their own for an exercise, it will get them more excited about preparing and then reading information then a simple label on an item/location.

Ideas: anatomy (qr codes on a mannequin/anatomical figure), parts of an engine, a nature trail - identifying plants, identifying health and safety signs around the college (provide a sheet of paper with the signs and the qr codes, they have to spot them around the college and fill in location) etc.