New School Alert System

This week I received a message from Jonathan Hoover about a new application his not-for-profit organization had released. I do not recommend products, but thought that this sounded like something that may be of interest to school administrators reading this blog. Note that I have not tried it, but if you have a need, it should be worth a look.

Through Schoohoo (www.schoohoo.com) he and his wife programmed an application to deliver free school alerts to schools of any size and at any grade level "From Preschool to Ph.D."(tm).

Alerts are sent via text message and email to parents, students, faculty, staff and others in the community about emergencies, but also weather closings, holidays, other days off, registration dates/times, PTA events, and the like. Parents can sign up themselves, so the school doesn't have to maintain the database. There will be a short advertisement included, or an advertisement-free version is available starting at $500 per year.

Check it out and if you try it, please let us know how it works.

Ambient Insight Webinar Series

Today Ambient Insight announced their new "Learning Technology Innovation" Webinar Series, hosted by Elluminate.

This is a series of six webinars through the end of the year provided by Sam Adkins and Tyson Greer. These folks follow the mobile learning market very closely and are one of my most trusted resources.

You can register for the free seminars at the Elluminate Events page. I have registered for all and already have them on my calendar.

New Mobile Learning Content Site

It is getting harder and harder to keep up with all that is happening with mobile learning.

Like you, I get lots of alerts and feeds and try to struggle through them each day, but that usually doesn’t happen due to time constraints. From every ten Google alerts on “mobile learning” there is usually only one that is relevant. Most have to do with mobile carts for learning, learning about something in Mobile, AL, or laptop projects. Alerts for “mlearn” used to be more relevant, but less often. Now it appears that Google has changed its search algorithms and is now picking up everything with “I’m learning” whether it is about cooking, driving, drugs, or anything else.

Now for those interested in mobile learning, there is a content community site that aggregates all the great post by actual implementers and researchers. Please visit cc.mlearnopedia.com and sign up for the RSS feed or bookmark it. If there are sites that we missed, please let us know.

For some of the popular e-learning experts and others who occasionally write about mobile initiatives or opportunities, these will also be picked up (as best as we can).

mLearnopedia.com will remain focused on news stories, articles, announcements, etc., but all the important blog details will be on cc.mlearnopedia.com.

Today we published a press release which you can view here. (PDF)

We’d love to hear your comments.

CES 2009

Last week I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas seeking mobile learning related tools and announcements.

The biggest mobile news in my opinion was that of the Palm Pre. The demo was very impressive and it should again move the industry, but until we get a chance to put it through its paces we will have to wait. The one thing that we know is that despite the down economy there will be new mobile devices hitting the market, each touting new improvements. We do need to make certain that our learning and performance support content will still operate on them.

If you are interested in the Palm Pre, check out the Palm site for information and the announcement video. For a good overview see Engadget’s review.

Bar codes were front and center with Nokia. Visitors were encouraged to send an SMS message with Nokia as the content to receive a link to download a 2D barcode and then bring their phone to the booth for a chance for a prize. The booth was busy. I had checked it out both with a BlackBerry Bold and the iPhone. The code was quite small, but the Nokia reader read it just fine. They certainly have improved it since last year.

BlackBerry’s booth was crowded with 3rd party apps. The arrangement of it made it very difficult to go through it systematically and make sure that you saw all the vendors.

LG showed their “Wearable Mobile Communicator” digital watch behind a glass case and did not release pricing or availability. It could be useful for SMS alerts.

MobileTV was being shown in several booths. I had planned to try it this week, but don’t have the bandwidth available.

While I was in Las Vegas I was able to use Qik on the Bold to video a few demos an interviews and was impressed with the ease of use and quality. There are so many used for this tool in education and training.

Although CES touted mobile as one of the next big things, most of their references were to automobiles and navigation or syncing. This was mainly in the North Hall where the bass speakers were blasting so loud that it was impossible to carry on a conversation.

Since mid-November we have driven over 5,500 miles escaping the snow and frigid weather. I certainly do not miss it, but have to admit to missing sitting in front of the fireplace. We are really enjoying the mobile lifestyle, but are experiencing varying levels of connectivity.