Today I had the privilege of chaperoning a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with two other faculty members and 22 students. I have not been to the Met in almost 25 years, sad to say. For me it was a very moving experience. I plan to go back very soon with some of my own children.

While at the museum I took part in a conference call. The conference call involved a discussion around using cell phones in the classroom in general, and specifically about how ipadio can assist with that practice. Besides myself, the other people taking part in the conference call that was broadcast live via ipadio, were Giles Bryan and Mark Smith from ipadio (profile link here), and Benjamin Wilkoff, an Online Learning and Technology Resource Specialist with the Douglas County Schools in Colorado ( profile link here). It was an invigorating conversation as we talked about how to use ipadio in education. I spoke about how some of the teachers at my school have used ipadio in our world language classes to capture students speaking in the target language. For me ipadio is Podcasting made simple. As I said before in one of my posts, with ipadio, if you can talk you can Podcast. You can listen to today's conversation below.

This past week one of the teachers in our World Language Department used student cell phones and ipadio to record pairs of students having a conversation about a famous Mexican painting. Prior to the activity the teacher paired the students off and had them write a dialog in Spanish talking about the Mexican painting. On the day of the activity the students paired off around the room and using one cell phone dialed into ipadio, entered the 4-digit access code, and began talking. When they were finished they just hung up the phone. Each of the recordings were saved in the teachers private ipadio account. Later that day the teacher listened to the conversations and assessed each student's performance.

After the class when I spoke with the teacher she told me that she had the students do the recording in groups at a time so that she did not have 20+ students talking at once. She said that doing the phone calls took less time than she planned. She had about 20 recordings and all but two worked as planned. One recording was nothing but static and the other one was just not that clear. The next day she had those students redo the activity.

The lesson required the students to study the culture of Mexico (painting), use correct grammar in writing the script, and use proper pronunciation in speaking the target language. Additionally, the activity afforded the students the opportunity to perform an oral activity with just one of their peers while talking on a cell phone (something they are quite comfortable with) as opposed to doing it in front of the whole class. The take away for the teacher was that she could listen to the recordings at her leisure and replay the conversations as much as needed to properly assess the student's performance. This scenario is much better than when the teacher has to assess the students live when they perform in front of the class. In the live scenario the teacher has to asses both students at the same time and does not have the option to replay the conversation.The end result is a much better assessment of the students speaking ability. The teacher can provide much richer feedback and even replay the recording for the student. The students enjoyed the activity and were eager to listen to themselves speaking.

I believe this activity demonstrates an innovative way to use student cell phones within the confines of the classroom and is an example of technology being used to accomplish something that would not be possible without the technology. Did I mention that the activity used none of the schools technology resources?

A big thank you to Liz Kolb for sharing about ipadio on her podcast and to James O'Malley from ipadio for setting up the "open channel" to make the multiple phone calls possible. Thank you also to the brave teacher in our world language department who was willing to use student cell phones in the classroom.