Phone camera rules needed to protect teachers

Mobile phones are being increasingly used as a teaching aid in the classroom despite the risk of students uploading footage on to video-sharing websites to name and shame their teachers. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

In the UK, guidelines are being developed to protect the privacy of teachers and students when mobile phones are used to film in classrooms.

The NSW Department of Education said individual schools were responsible for developing their own mobile phone protocols.

... A paper on the use of mobile phones in teacher training has been published in the latest issue of the British journal ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology.

The paper suggests that mobile technologies can enhance teacher and student learning.

Related:

-- Cell phones used in classroom learning

-- Links to articles related to cameraphones and school projects

Online service helps students 'capture' class notes

It used to be a notebook and a sharp pencil were all you needed to take notes in class. But today, many students are turning to their cell phones instead. WKYC reports.

"Instead of scribbling what's on the board or recreating a diagram, students take a picture with their cameraphone and send it to themselves by e-mail, thanks to an online service called "Qipit."

Students can then upload the digital copy of the picture on their computer.

Qipit's Benoit Bergeret says his online company works like a free copy service, turning handwritten or printed documents into high contrast digital copies. "Qipit transforms the photo of the document into a black and white or black and color copy of that document," said Bergeret.

Qipit is like having a handheld scanner, a homework partner who takes notes all from your cell phone.

Qipit lets you store up to 25 documents on their website for free.

You can password protect your files or in the case of a class project give others access to your notes."

Students Make Cell Phone Movies For Class Credit

How's this for a class project? Make a movie only using cell phones. That's what students at Boston University are doing for credit, reports The Associated Press.

"The exercise is part of a class created through a partnership with cellular company Amp'd Mobile and taught by director Jan Egleson. During the semester, the students will produce a series of short episodes that eventually will be distributed by the company for its cellular customers."

Teaching Kids With Mobile Video

Wireless streaming video is an effective teaching tool. At least, that's what one of the top educational media organizations in the country has found in a new study. Wireless Week reports via Moco News.

"A study on the benefits of using streaming video to teach young children has been conducted by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), sponsored by Sesame Street Workshop, Sprint, WestEd, and GoTV Networks.

Preschoolers participating in the study had video clips of "Learning Letters with Elmo" streamed to them weekly over the phones. Each lesson covered several letters of the alphabet, with new letters introduced each week. "All participants indicated improvements in children's knowledge of the ABC alphabet song as well as letters of the alphabet. At the end of the study, every child knew some of the letters, which was not the case in the beginning," said PBS in a statement."

Educational TV programmes on mobile phones

NTT DoCoMo is launching a new educational service for mobile phone, reports L'Internaute.

"e-lesson NHK" (NHK is a Japanese public TV channel) are based on the educational programmes (such as foreign languages).

The programmes targets mobile phones-addicts between 10 and 30 years old and uses interactivity in many forms: animations, pictures, audio and video.

The Vendee Globe on your mobile phone

Ellen McArthur's boat is packed with mobile technology to keep fans up-to-date with its progress in the Vendee Globe round-the-world yacht race which starts on Sunday.

The Offshore Challenges boat has been fitted out with four webcams and a satellite broadband system which sends all the latest information back to Offshore Challenges' control centre. From there it is reformatted for the various iTAGG services (which also provides the Good Pub Guide and an other service enabling club goers to by-pass the queue by sending an SMS.)

Steve Procter, CEO at iTAGG, told The Register: "I'm surprised by how much people will pay for quite poor content. Compared to three or four pounds for a ringtone paying less than a pound for a picture of a sporting celebrity seems reasonable."

Images of big events during the race could be on the handset of users in France and the UK within minutes. They can send an SMS to receive the latest news by reply, sign up to a subscription service, access a Wap site or download a Java application to keep them updated all the time.

Contest gets kids to use cell phones for school projects

High school students have found that camera-integrated mobile phones are not only good for exchanging e-mail messages and snapshots but also for carrying out their school projects, according to Japan Times.

"A contest sponsored by Vodafone K.K, held for the first time, intended to make high school students think of ways to use their camera-equipped mobile phones for scientific and environmental studies.

The winning team, a six-student group from Horikawa High School in Kyoto received the first prize Monday for their use of mobile phones to study the so-called heat island phenomenon. Students simultaneously measured temperatures at several points of the city and used their mobile phones to send the data to a computer at their school".