Thursday, 12 December 2013

Skydrive and iPhone

I’ve been using my iPhone a lot in the classroom. I take pictures or record videos of the children in the classroom or when we are out on concerts, theatres or fieldtrips. Then I easily upload the pictures to my Skydrive-app in the phone and open them on Skydrive on the computer in the classroom. We have a projector in the classroom which projects the computer screen on to the whiteboard. I’ve also taken pictures of books that I read aloud to the children so that everyone can follow the text and look at the pictures in the book on the big screen while I’m reading. You could also let the children record videos of each other or take pictures of their work and show it on the big screen.

Skydrive is one of many “clouds” that loads your information on a server which you are able to reach from any computer. All you have to do is log in. It is also possible to share your photos and documents with others. Skydrive also has an app for iPhones that you can download from App Store.
If you use your private iPhone you need to remember to delete the photos and recordings from your phone after you’ve uploaded them on Skydrive. It doesn’t feel right ethical to have a lot of photos of the children in your private iPhone. The best thing would of course be if the school could buy at least one iPhone or iPad for each class.
The advantage of using iPhone and Skydrive instead of an ordinary digital camera is that it is wireless and much faster. One drawback is however that you depend on the company that owns the cloud. If they decide to shut down the cloud you lose all your information if you haven’t saved it anywhere else.

1 comment:

  1. I thought that this was interesting to read, because it is so easy to bring the I-phone when you are out with the students. With an I-phone you can take both pictures and make movies. In our school we have one I-pad in every classroom. We always bring it with us when we are out. One smaller group have the responsible for the “pad” (different groups every time) and they have the mission to make a little movie with it and then present it for the whole class when we are back in the classroom.

    I have never heard about Sky Drive before. It sounded practical because our memory gets full so fast. But if we should save it on Sky Drive we could save it for longer time and maybe have a family meeting in the end of the school year.

    I think it is important that the school priority money to buy this technical tools because there it is important to learn to use them in these technical times. And the student thinks it very funny to use them.

    Best regards Stefan Nilsson

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