This little darling which you can buy for £15 has helped my students gain easier access to thousands of pounds worth of mobile, high resolution, imaging equipment.
Instead of:
- Fiddling with cables (cables which students never have with them, and are different for every make of equipment)
- Carefully lining up infra red ports on the few staff laptops which have them
- Popping out increasingly miniscule memory cards, finding the correct adapters and slotting them into card readers
- Sending pictures to my mobile phone and me then transferring them to my computer.
Students can now easily Bluetooth pictures from their phones to my laptop.
We’ve had open learning week at school, where year 9s enjoy a wide range of activities. However many digital cameras we make available (we had five for 30 students today) it never seems enough. So by installing a USB bletooth adapter (that’s what the thing above is) students were able to use their own cameras (on their mobile phones) to bluetooth pictures to the school network. This gave us access to thousands of pounds worth of equipment which the students carry around.
It worked and they loved it!
What had started as either a regular presentation or newspaper producing task turned into a mobile, citizen journalism task. Students relished the opportunity to be taught how to make more complete use of their phones.
Of course now I’m faced with more quesitons to consider and work to do:
- How should our policy on mobile phone usage reflect the potential for students to use them in learning experiences?
- Will the Bluetooth adapters work on student logins?
- Do staff know how to use he Bluetooth adapters already built into their laptops?
- Why does everyone laugh when I call it a Bluetooth dongle?
- How do we make sure that students fully realise the dangers, responsibilities and vulnerabilities of living in communities with such powerful, invasive, discrete, mobile technologies?
How come the smallest steps seem to raise so many more questions and opportunities!
