Thanks to Will Richardson at weblogged for posting this video: YouTube video titled “Phone Book.”
Check it out – then ponder Will’s follow-on comments and questions:
- Apple’s next iTouch is coming out with 64GB of memory, and the iPhone won’t be too far behind that.
- In the next five years, every phone will be an iPhone. (And let’s not forget that there are already over 100,000 apps for that little sucker, many of them with relevance to the classroom.)
- We’ll soon be seeing what Steve Rubel is calling a “dumb shell” that takes the book idea in that video and creates a netbook sized (at least) keyboard and screen that your phone simply plugs into.
- According to NPR, the Pew Hispanic Center says that there is a definite trend toward phones being chosen over computers as computing devices, especially for those on the wrong end of the current digital divide. (The article makes more sense of that than I just did.)
Which leads Will to ” a whole bunch of questions”:
- If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?
- How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?
- At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?
- How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?
We are increasingly hearing from customers deploying iPod Touches as part of 1:1 initiatives – so much so that we will soon have a iPhone/iPod mobile filter to enforce AUP policies on and off the network like our current Mac and PC mobile filtering options.
Any of you pursuing this option?
Joel
