One of the challenges of Web 2.0 apps is that there are frequent changes to the business models, often resulting in services that were originally free going to a pay-per model or sometimes going away altogether. I understand that everyone needs to be self-sustaining, but it’s a challenge for schools using these tools. (This is one of the reasons I love open source software — you know it’s always going to be free.)

This recently happened with two tools I use. One is Gabcast, which used to be free, but now has a time limit of 4 minutes as a free trial plan. In looking for another free tool to do phonecasting (recording audio from a phone and posting it directly to your blog of podcast), I haven’t quite find one that fits the bill. I tried phonecasting.com but had some challenges getting it set up. I’m still looking into a few other options, so stay tuned. (drop.io allows you to record files by phone but is lacking some other useful features. It is really intended as a broader file sharing tool, rather than just a phonecasting app.) If you have an app for this you like, please let me know.

I also used a web site for checking for plagiarism that was free but now charges. In looking for alternatives, I found The Plagiarism Checker from the University of Maryland, which looks good. They also offer a premium version for a fee, but the basic one worked fine for me. (I tested out others as well, but they seemed to think everything written at a high level was plagiarized, even original work of my own.) I have not used this application extensively, but in trying it out, it seemed to work well.  I also looked for open source alternatives, but didn’t find any.

If you have your own favorites in these categories, please add a comment and let us know.

For those of you in my session “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction,” here are the links to the cell phone stuff we did:

Photo blogging from a cell phone

Audio blogging from a cell phone

Polling via text messaging

And here are the results of the survey:

As reported earlier, Audioblogger is discontinuing its wonderful service, and so we’ve been evaluating other similar services to see if there is a good replacement out there. So far, the winner is GabCast.

Gabcast has a few features that I liked even better than Audioblogger. Most notably, you call a toll-free 800 number to use the service, making it completely free. They also offer automatic RSS feeds, making this a viable solution for low-end podcasting.

You can hear an example of this in the previous post. This recording was made by just calling an 800 #, entering my channel # and password, and talking! Pretty slick. They even have a nice tool that automatically posts the audio posts to your blog (as shown here). There is a conference call option that sounds pretty neat. Stay tuned for a test of that.

If you know of other (preferrably free) audio blogging sites that have good features, post them here. Thanks!

I just heard that Audioblogger, one of my favorite services for posting audio directly from a phone (and which I just blogged about earlier today) is going away. They have suggested several other similar services. I’ll check them out over the next week or so and let you know how they look.

Many of you have seen me demonstrate the amazing application with which you can record a podcast from any phone and have it posted directly to a web site without having to touch a computer.

To do this, you first need a Blogger account. (Blogger is a cheap, easy way to publish your own classroom blog or web page. Just make sure your district doesn’t block it if you intend to use it at school.) Then you need to set up an AudioBlogger account. The whole thing is FREE (except that the number you need to call to post is a toll call)!

This is a really powerful, yet simple, technology. What I like about it is that anyone can do it — all you have to do is dial a phone number and talk. No creating a web page, no FTP’ing files, no HTML.

This is a great way for teachers to get information about homework assignments and class activities home to parents. Just call on your way home from school. It’s also a good way to have students post oral responses to questions or prompts.