Backchannel Chats in Your Classroom

http://www.chatzy.com/advanced.htm

There's a quick start that's one-to-one chatting, but you want the "chat room" option
that is the link above. Name the room and provide a password and your chat
session should be good to go.

One cool thing I just heard someone say yesterday . . . they opened a chatzy
room for students to comment and question during a movie. One or two
students were given the room admin password and expected to moderate, and
the teacher was also a participant. How thought provoking is that!?

Blogging Challenge

This is something I need to do with classes next year! Let's take a Blogging Challenge.

WiiMount

Here's an idea for mounting the Wii on your wall. I went to Home Depot and bought $12 of plumbing materials and used a can of tan spray paint I had at home. The result is a setup that won't attract lots of attention and will fix the wiimote in place. I won't glue the parts together, by the way, so things can be repositioned later.

The parts I bought are all 2" black pipe (the kind they use for waste-water in households). I put part numbers for Home Depot in case that's helpful.

811000011022 2ft ABS (which I cut down to 8")

012871528910 ABS EL

012871529856 ABS EL (One of the ELs is a 45 degree corner, and the other is 22.5 degrees. With these two ELs, you can rotate them to make the right degree for your classroom.)

739236300546 ABS Drain (I took off the metal piece and used this to attach the setup to the wall.)

Wii-Boards for Classrooms

Last night we held a Geeknight and cobbled together some IR pens to work the magic of the Wii-Board (fashioning interactive whiteboards for the cost of a Nintendo Wii-mote). We gutted an Expo marker and filled it with parts from Radio Shack ($10 total). They're also available for sale for that price--pre-assemebled--online. One remarkable thing we discovered is the burgeoning community of Wii-board fans that have begun to produce IR pens and other gadgets to help teachers make Wii-boards. One great resource is http://www.wiimoteproject.com/.

Today I went to http://www.irpens.co.uk/store.htm and bought 2 of the DJewel pens (because you can go manual button or pressure tip, and that's worth the extra couple of bucks to me). I also bought the rechargable battery pack from them so that I can just keep it plugged into USB and not burn through batteries, and to provide the constant USB power I bought a wall AC/USB adapter (I'll put a shopping list at the bottom).

With all the extra hardware and a $35 Wiimote from Walmart, my total cost per setup is less than $65. We haven't found yet the beautiful solution for mounting them (more on mounting them in a second), but that will add a bit.

Getting them to work with the Bluetooth on our laptops was not too bad for the Windows machines and super-easy for the Macs. Though there is a for-cost solution called Smoothboard, the downloads that seemed to work best are free. For the PC this was the best: http://www.uweschmidt.org/files/WiimoteWhiteboard.zip and the download that worked so excellently for the Mac was this one: http://www.uweschmidt.org/files/WiimoteWhiteboard.dmg. This software provides all the necessary drivers, picks up any "findable" Wiimotes (make them findable by holding both buttons 1 and 2), and calibrates the Wiimote (or multiple Wiimotes) to the projection surface. Basically, once you've activated the software, you have a new mouse ready to give input to the application of your choice--I enjoyed fooling around with a wall-sized Google Earth.

It is very possible to mount a single Wiimote and have it track your IR pen's movement, but if the pen ever blocks the line of sight to the Wiimote, that breaks the mouse's movement. We had stellar results when we coordinated 2 Wiimotes at the same projection screen (mounted above and to each side at about 45 degrees). In my classroom, this would be a Wiimote on each wall, at ceiling height, set about 8 feet back from the plane of the front projection screen. If you buy a second pen with the second setup, you're still only in $130 into the project.

I teach in a middle school, and I just have a suspicion that having identifiable Wiimotes on my walls would make them a theft target. So I'm looking for wall or ceiling mounting ideas that will also conceal the handheld units!

Very exciting stuff! Fun to play with, and potentially a game-changer for the classroom.

Shopping List

AC to USB Power Adapter $2.50

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4837

USB Rechargeable Battery Adapter $12.50

http://www.irpens.co.uk/store.htm

Pressure Sensitive IR Pen $18

http://www.irpens.co.uk/store.htm

Wiimote

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=8070470

EdTech Professional Development Video

Film on the Fly

At ITSC this year, and in talking with Dennis Grice and Wesley Fryer, I learned about a cell phone movie-making competition called Film on the Fly.

I arranged with some of my middle school students to meet me at the school on Saturday morning, and we worked through lunch to edit a little video. First of all we spent some time fooling around with our cell phones, getting bluetooth working, trying out drop.io and K7 as methods for getting audio from the phones, etc.

All the photos were taken with our cell phones!

Here is our end-product:

Cell Phone to MP3

Like many of my peers, I have used Gabcast as a tool to generate mp3 files from phone calls. It's been a great resource, to have a toll-free number that students can call from any phone, and then their voice becomes an mp3 file that is ready to become a podcast episode or a component in a classroom video, or whatever. With so many high-quality microphones (in the form of cell phones and land lines) around, why not use them?!

But as of March 1st, Gabcast is no longer most-favored for classroom use:
Purchase minutes? Wha? When free services become for-cost services, most educators look for the "exit" sign. And I'm no exception.

So I found two good options for capturing voice: K7 and Drop.io.

K7
This is the answering machine I've been using for some time--I've just never used it for students to call. It's really, really easy to set up, and the results are pretty cool: You get a phone number with a Seattle area code that people can send faxes to or leave messages on. If they send a fax, it comes to my email. If they leave a voice message, it comes to my email as a WAV file.
My students were doing the Film on the Fly competition this weekend, and we had success getting voice files from cell phone to computer this way.

Drop.io
I love my Drop.io boxes! There's a post about drop.io in this blog from a while back, but I wasn't specific about what it can do with cell phones. Students can call a phone number and leave a message, and it becomes an mp3 available to everyone with access to the drop (which can be completely public or hidden behind a password). A cell phone can MMS (texting with pics or vids) to my drop.io-issued email address, and the pics and vids show up instantly in the drop. From there they can be linked to, embedded, or downloaded. Gotta love it!