original photo by Milica Sekulic

Cindy Shirley’s video, “My Friendship Story,” is an example of a digital story created using drop.io for audio recording, Audacity software, and PhotoStory3. It was told from the perspective of Sacajawea about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This was created for our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling project. All of Cindy’s audio was recorded with drop.io. Cindy is a teacher in Stratford, Oklahoma.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Thomas Sheppard is a junior high technology teacher in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. Last week he shared a session on using drop.io with other teachers during a professional development day, and posted his session handout (in MS Word format) to his blog. This five page handout provides a good introduction to drop.io and how it can be used as a virtual “inbox” for students turning in their work to their teachers.

Drop.io provides 100 MB or approximately 450 minutes of free recording time to users. To learn more, check out my May 17, 2009, podcast, “Comparing Drop.io and Gabcast for Cell Phone Digital Recording.” Kansas educators Dean Mantz and Brian Richter also discussed drop.io on May 2, 2009, at the PodStock Conference in Wichita. Links from their session are available, as well as a podcast audio recording.

Drop.io is now my favorite website for phone-based audio recording, since it provides 100 MB of free space to any user. This equates to approximately 450 minutes of recorded audio. After creating a free drop.io site, users are provided with an extension and phone number to provide to students, parents, and others who can leave recorded audio messages in a virtual “drop.” Unlike Gabcast, Drop.io does not log the phone numbers of people who call and leave messages. That is a real advantage of Gabcast, since it provides accountability for students and others who call in to leave a message. Both Gabcast and Gcast can also be used for cell phone and land-line phone digital audio recording, but neither Gabcast or Gcast offers this service for free. Drop.io does. If you need more web space and time for phone recording. drop.io only charges $10 per year for an additional gigabyte of storage space. I think this is an amazing deal, and I am not affiliated in any way with drop.io! Drop.io also offers “Drop.io Manager” to manage file sharing for larger projects, as well as other features.

Check out drop.io’s webpage, “leave voicemail on a drop” for more information about using the phone-based recording features. For more suggestions on using cell phones for learning with students, check out Liz Kolb’s book “Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education” and her 2007 K-12 Online Conference presentation, “Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools.” Liz’ blog is “From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning,” and she is lkolb on Twitter.

I recorded a fifty minute podcast today comparing the features of drop.io to Gabcast, and also shared a little about a lecturecasting project with which I was involved this past spring.

If your school or school district prohibits students from having or using their cell phones during class, I am NOT encouraging you to break that rule. Regardless of your local cell phone use policies, however, it is likely fine for students to use a phone (cell or land line) when they are at home to complete an assignment. Consider asking students to submit an assignment to you via a phone and a drop.io account you create in advance. This could be a “regular” assignment or something for extra credit. It is a good idea to provide students with guidelines for their call’s contents, including the way you want students to identify themselves in the recording. Be aware the drop.io call-in number is a New York area code, so students will most likely want to use a cell phone to call which provides free long distance. Don’t get yourself in trouble asking students to make long distance phone calls to New York that result in new phone charges to parents! While Gabcast and Gcast are not free, they do offer toll-free numbers for students and others to call to leave messages. Gcast currently charges $99 per year for unlimited use of its cell phone call-in recording service, Gabcast charges 10 cents per minute for recorded calls. All three of these services use a server-based solution to convert recorded audio calls to mp3 format which are available to download and edit as desired, or link to directly.

Hat tip to Dean Mantz for sharing about drop.io’s phone recording capabilities several weeks ago at the 2009 PodStock Conference, hosted by ESSDACK in Wichita, Kansas.

Are you aware of other websites in addition to Drop.io, Gabcast, and Gcast which offer similar phone-based recording features, permitting students and others to create “no-edit” podcasts which are immediately available online? AudioBoo permits no-edit audio file publishing, but published files are NOT included in a personalized RSS feed / podcast channel as they are with Drop.io, Gabcast, and Gcast. AudioBoo also requires an iPhone and cannot (currently) be used with other types of phones. GeoGraffiti also permits location-based audio recording, but does not include its Internet-published audio files in a personalized podcast feed. I’d love to know of other services (particularly those with a basic level of free service, like drop.io) which permit “no-edit”audio  podcasting.

To create a recorded podcast of class lectures, Mid-Del teachers run the application “Podcast Capture” on their MacBook or MacBook Pro laptops and connect to the Podcast Producer server. Audio with multimedia slides, audio-only, or audio and video is then captured and published to the teacher’s website following the lesson. A professional looking “intro” is added to the front of each recorded podcast by Podcast Producer automatically (including the school district’s logo and copyright statement,) and each episode is added to the class’ RSS feed. Students in classes like Mr. White’s Pre-AP Math Analysis course can subscribe to these “course-casts” using iTunes or another “podcatcher” software application. Episodes can also be played directly over the web using any web browser. Students can replay entire class lectures, or fast forward to a particular point in the lesson to review it as needed. Recent posts from Mr. White’s class include “Complex Solutions of Equations” from April 13th, “Complex Numbers” from April 10th, and “Law of Cosines” from April 9th. All class lecture episodes are available on Mr. White’s wiki page on the Mid-Del podcast producer server, and are also included in his class’ automatically-generated RSS feed.

Mid-Del Schools’ use of podcasts was featured in the Oklahoma City News9 report from March 2, 2009, “Mid-Del Podcasts Capture Students’ Attention.”

Mid-Del Public Schools is one of the most innovative districts in the state of Oklahoma, and continues to blaze a trail of excellence when it comes to helping empower both teachers and students to utilize digital media to enhance learning. In addition to the Pod Squad, under the leadership of Instructional Technology Director Dr. Don Wilson as well as Assistant Superintendent Dr. Katherine Hughes, Mid-Del has created an an instructional learning portal for teachers using the free learning management system Moodle (learn.mid-del.net) The district continues to play a leading role in the statewide digital storytelling and oral history project “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices,” and is using the micro-blogging platform Twitter to keep parents and other community constituents informed about district news. (Follow @middelnews) District teachers have used the free website Ning to create their own learning community, “Mid-Del Tech Geeks.” It is refreshing and inspiring to see the positive difference visionary leaders can have in a school district like Mid-Del!

Kudos to leaders in Mid-Del Public Schools for finding so many ways to effectively leverage technology’s potential to open new doors of learning for students and teachers alike!

For additional background about the evolution of Mid-Del’s use of Podcast Producer, see my April 2008 podcast, “Solving the Publish At Will Challenge for K-12 Teachers with Podcast Producer.”

1. Blogging and microblogging
2. Email
3. student response systems
4. Researching
5. Note taking
6. RSS reading
7. Organizing

Among all the potential and actual uses of cell phones to enhance and support learning, I am most enthused as well as optimistic about the cell phone’s ability to be used as a mobile recording device. The websites Gabcast and Gcast permit cell phone users (and users of ANY phone, for that matter) to directly record audio to the Internet in mp3 format. This process is similar to leaving a voicemail message for someone. Today, thanks again to Liz Kolb, I learned about the website PhoneCasting which also features mobile audio recording functionality.

In our statewide oral history and digital storytelling project, “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices,” we have had several teachers use these websites to record interviews with parents and grandparents who were not geographically close enough to interview in-person during our 2.5 day workshops. The videos “Richard Ivie-World War II” by Dawn Danker and “The Dirty Thirties” by Jeanette Hale are both examples of cellphone-powered digital stories. Dawn used Gcast to enable her mother, Shirley, to record World War II memories of her step-father over the phone which Dawn later edited for her final oral history story. Jeanette used Gabcast to enable her grandmother, who had just turned 90 the week of our workshop in Oklahoma City, to call in with the help of a relative from the Oklahoma panhandle and recount stories she remembered as a child growing up in the heart of the dust bowl. Without these cell phone audio recording websites, it is doubtful either of these digital stories would have been created at all. Even if they had been created, without the cell phone audio recording functionality they would not have included the priceless voices of family members who were eyewitnesses to history. These uses of cell phones to support learning demonstrate, in my view, clear examples of “transformative” technology use which enables learning to take place which would have been impossible without the use of those technologies.

The most basic problem when it comes to introducing cell phones as learning tools in most classrooms and school contexts seems to be that many teachers and school leaders aren’t interested in empowering students to share their voices and publish their ideas for a global audience. That learning objective is not on the state assessment. In addition, to coin a phrase frequently used by Nevada elementary teacher Brian Crosby, this type of learning is usually “messy learning.” Many teachers and administrators are not “into” messy learning, in which students are talking, collaborating, discussing, and actively working. Many educators prefer a sterile, quiet, entirely CONTROLLED learning environment in which students sit passively at their desks in neat rows, attentively listening to a lecture delivered by the teacher and taking copious notes with rapt attention.

The fact that most cell phones today have more power than the computers NASA had in the 1960s and 1970s when the United States landed men on the moon is remarkable. The fact that computers have now been in our schools and classrooms for THIRTY years and in many cases have not succeeded in changing predominant educational practices in schools is not only sobering but also potentially depressing.

Even if your school bans the use of cell phones by students AT SCHOOL, it is still possible for your students to constructively and legally use their cell phones for learning at home on their own time. Consider giving a homework assignment to students this year which involves their use of either a Gabcast or Gcast channel to share their thoughts and reflections with you and each other.

Are you aware of other websites in addition to Gabcast, Gcast, and Phonecasting which enable cell phones to be used as mobile audio recorders? I think tools like these sites have rich assessment possibilities which we have just begun to imagine and explore as 21st century educators and co-learners.