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.

File transfer between multiple devices - Red Halo

At Handheld Learning last year, I came across a company called Red Halo. I've seen them around before but it never twigged how useful their offering was until MoLeNET came along.

Basically, you set up an account on their server, then download the Red Halo application to your device (I have it running on my HTC Touch and Q1 Ultra. They will soon have one for the Asus eee). Press the sync button on your Red Halo Application and voila, files go up to the server, and files come down to your device.

The idea is that a teacher can set up student accounts, put files in them (could be learning content, audio files, video files etc) and these would then be pushed onto the learners' devices when they sync. I haven't tested large video and audio files so will have to find out more about this. Also, I envisage that it would work best in a wireless environment, or if the learners have a flat rate data plan so they are not charged per Mb of data transfer.

At the same time, student files are sent from the device up to their student area: so photos, videos and audio they have created, notes and drawings etc are all uploaded and the teacher can view them and add a comment to them.

The Pro version also comes with some software to add functionality - The Windows Mobile bundle for PDAs and smartphones includes RedActivity, Inspiration, PhatPad, Pocket Painter, Photo Explorer, Opera, Red Media Composer, RedFlipper and Calligrapher. Sounds worth it for the software alone, never mind the 5Gb storage space you're given online!

You can contact them to sign up for free accounts at the moment. Anyone who has a lot of devices to sync should try it. Nothing to lose! www.redhalo.com