Even today’s basic cell phones come with cameras and voice recorders with some models even having decent video recorders. Students can use the multimedia tools already built into today’s cell phone to gather a variety of evidence in a variety of forms for their school work. If a student doesn’t have a cell phone or doesn’t want to use it, that’s OK. If a student does have a cell phone and wants to leverage it’s multimedia features to demonstrate their learning, then that’s OK too. Just imagine it. MORE >>

Lift the Cell Phone Ban: Hosted on the Scholastic website, this article is a plea to lift the ban on cell phones in schools and to use these devices to help students learn. From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning : Liz Kolb’s blog on using cell phones for learning. School Axes Textbooks as Pupils Download their Homework onto their Mobile Phones: A news article in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper on a school that is moving away from analog content and toward digital content. link]. link]. link]. A post found on the iPod Hacker Blog. link]. link]. MORE >>

Of course, teacher may be very uncomfortable sharing their phone number with students and this is a very legitimate concern.  More about this service can be found in my blog post Polling by Cell Phone – Can We Completely By-Pass Clickers? Therefore, everyday tools such as cell phones and text messaging can be utilized to gain that precious feedback required to ensure that students are learning.  Disclaimer #1 : The ideas suggested here use the text messaging features of a cell phone.  Another tool is text messaging. This is where the text message comes in.  MORE >>

Connecting back to a previous blog post where I was musing on the difference between Differentiated Instruction and Universal Design for Learning , we can see that today’s cell phones are adding more functionality and are designed with the spirit of Universal Design in mind.  Just as sensored doors equally assist those in wheel chairs, baby strollers or those whose hands are full of bags, today’s cell phones are adding more functionality that incorporates features that traditionally have been associated with “assistive technology&# and made it available to everyone.  MORE >>

One way that cell phones can be utilized without having them inside of the classroom, is by developing projects for the cell phone. One project could be to have students' create unique ringtones for their own phone or to share with others. Using a free web resource called Ring Blender , students can actually compose, mix, and share their ringtones to their cell phone directly from the Ring Blender website. Therefore, students do not need to bring their cell phones into the classroom to create a content-based ringtone project. UPDATE! MORE >>