Well, the workshop on “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction” that I wrote about earlier is pretty well finished. I’m really happy with the content in it and think this is a great resource for schools using mobile tech and looking for resources.

I’ve structured this in a wiki, and it is intended to be used for either a face-to-face workshop or as an online self-guided learning experience.

This is licensed under a CC BY SA license, so you are free to use it for your own purposes as well.

This is my first attempt at using a wiki to facilitate both a F2F workshop and a self-guided experience. If you go through it, let me know what you think.

As a part of the fun I’m having contributing to Wikijunior (part of Wikibooks, offering free, open content textbooks), I’ve taken an animal alphabet book there and made video and ebook versions of it.

They’re available for viewing and download here.

There are versions for the desktop, various handhelds, iPods, and even a Mobipocket ebook version. (One of the not-fun things about creating video is all the format issues. I think we’ve put about everything up here, but let me know if anything’s been missed.)

If you haven’t ventured into the world of contributing to wikis, Wikijunior is a great place to start. (Try the Human Body book or Ancient Civilizations.) The more people who contribute to these free “copyleft” resources, the better they will be. If you’re not sure how to start, try something small like fixing an error or just adding a couple sentences. It’s a lot of fun!

I love the recent explosion of user-created video content that’s going on in the world. It’s creative, thought-provoking, and empowering. I’ve also written previously about the great potential of video to help differentiate instruction and enrich student learning.

However [rant coming]…the wide variety of video formats, codecs, etc. is driving me crazy! The more time I spend with video, the more time I spend with conversion tools and help pages about what device and software use what format and what codec, and the more time I spend mumbling about why this *%#%&*(# video won’t play right.

One tool I’ve found really useful for this though is Zamzar. This is a free online converter that works not only with video, but also with images, docs, and audio. One really useful thing this tool does very well is to convert videos from YouTube and TeacherTube, so that you can view them on a variety of devices such as iPods and handhelds. You just upload the video (or a link) and select the format you want. Then they email you a link for the converted file. (They do seem to have some DNS problems with their email system, but I’ve found it works well with gmail accounts, so if you have problems getting an email, try that.)

As with all web-based content, make sure to watch for copyright and attribution issues. And with all Web 2.0 services, you should read the Terms of Service.

And for those who are curious, the name is a take-off on Gregor Samsa, intended to connote transformation.

With all the iPods that are out there and the power of mobile devices to differentiate instruction, I’ve been looking at various ways to incorporate more interactivity into iPod content.

I started with Quizzler, a program that I really love for handhelds. A big benefit of this is that if you already have a bunch of Quizzler quizzes created, it’s an easy port. However, the features of this are pretty basic and include no multimedia support.

Next I got the quiz program PodQuiz Maker. It’s basically a front end to the Notes program. Good idea, but not the greatest implementation. It does have a way to link to sound and video files, but it’s very awkward.

Then Apple announced the new iQuiz program as an iPod game. (Tony Vincent has written a review of it here.) It has a beautiful interface, but no way to link to sound or video files. For my envisioned application in education, this misses the whole point. (We want to be able to provide information and then have a way to interact with it.)

Next, I found Mogopop. This is getting closer. They have a nice web-based interface for content creation. You can link to sound, video, and images. There’s no built-in way to do quizzes, but you can do this through hyperlinks. The program is very new and seems a bit buggy in places, but it has definite potential.

Here’s a sample project I made:

(You’ll need to download the Mogopop Manager program to download this to your iPod.) Once you get it to your iPod, it will be in Extras.

The next thing to build into this is recordkeeping. That’s a big project though.

Does anyone know anything else out there for creating interactive content for the iPod? I’m not sure whether to wait until Apple realizes that closing their device to developers is unwise (probably a very long wait), hope some developers come out with better tools, or start working on something myself.