Mobile Technology Training and Research Days

Held at the Technology School of The Future (Cr of Port Rd and Millner St)

What is mobile technology? What more can our mobile phones do?

This is what four members of our school went to Adelaide to find out.
On the 21st and 22nd of March Mr Ruwoldt, James Hunt, Rebekah Poel and Ben Broad attended two training days to learn about some new ways that we could use some Mobile Technologies that are currently in trial stages.

The first day involved learning how to use our mobile phones for making and playing location based games with the guidance of Deb Polson. A location based game is where you are involved in the game by moving around in an environment. During the first day our team was sent out onto the street to make a scavenger hunt series of questions. We where then asked to head back to The School of The Future to make our quest using their computers. We logged onto a website where we entered our questions, answers and hints for the game. We developed a story background for the game. While we played other teams games they played ours. We were required to follow their clues delivered to our phone via SMS and then we entered our answers via SMS. Where we were wrong we got a hint from the game server and where we were right we got the next clue.

Our team got a special mention in the Deb Polson Masterclass that evening because of the additional research and higher order thinking that we chose to apply to our game development.

We think that this technology could be used at school for things like the end of year Year 12 Scavenger Hunt, Art Gallery tours, Museum tours and SOSE field trips.

The text limitations of SMS and the fact that people needed to be able to play the game without assistance meant our language had to be extremely precise. The tools for creating the game where incredibly simple to use.

Day 2 was primarily centred around PODMO. Podmo is a new Adelaide bred technology, which is based around the idea that bluetooth can be used to create shared global networks between mobile phones. PODMO has shown itself to have great potential for free information sharing including content such as text, images, animation, movies, instant messaging, mp3 and VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). The fantastic thing is that all this can be accessed for free within Podmo blue tooth blue zones. We are excited about the fact that we can create multimedia content to be shared on PODMO. Each of us are keen to create a blue zone at home and at school to play with and to share content with our friends.

Relating to this, in week 11, our school has been given the privilege of having a few members of http://www.anat.org.au/ come and help a group of students develop multimedia content that we hope will be shared via PODMO at school.

Report prepared by Ben, Bek, James and Mr Ruwoldt

No excuse for lost work.

From time to time students loose work because of things like their computer crashing, loosing their USB storage and so on. It would be good if the following could be talked about at home as well as at school.

In order to keep their work safe, students need to make sure that there is more than one copy of their work. The following points will help

• At school ONLY work from drive H:. Drive H: is backed up three times each week.
• When they want to take work home, they should copy the work onto their USB storage or email it to their home address.
• At home, copy the work to their work area on the home computer. Often this is in ‘My Documents’ At home ONLY work from this work area.
  
• To get the work back to school, copy the work from the home computer back onto the USB storage or email it to their school email address.

The following email considerations need to be looked at

• The email service that the school is provided with has a size limit of 2MB. Files close to this or larger are rejected.
• Students have a quote of 5MB on their email. If they do not check and maintain their school email properly, they will quickly fill their quota and not be able to receive further email

Sometimes it is important to keep copies of their work at various stages of their project development. This allows for situations where they need to fall back to an earlier version because of some problems with their later work. Doing this can prevent them from having to start over.