Live Streaming an Out of Classroom Learning Experience

As part of my Introduction to Environmental Studies course, I take students on various weekend field trips. One of the elements of the course is to introduce students to the diverse, and often unexpected, natural wonders throughout New Jersey. To this end, students read, among other works, John McPhee's "The Pine Barrens" and Robert Sullivan's "The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City". We then take weekend field trips to these places and experience what is discussed in the books. The Meadowlands trip is one of the more popular with students due in large part to the wonderfully entertaining and educational ecotours provided by The Hackensack Riverkeeper. Unfortunately, since these trips take place on weekends, some of the students are unable to attend. This fall, my course was a pilot program for a new mobile computing program, SHUmobile, at Seton Hall University. This program is exploring the use of smartphones as teaching and learning devices. Using the Nokia N95s that students were provided through this pilot program, we were able to live stream video from the boat. Students who were unable to attend could view the ecotour live or watched archived clips at a later date. The livestreaming was made possible by a free mobile software application called Qik.

In addition to the live streaming video, some students took geo-tagged photos using their N95s, which has a built in GPS unit, and the Nokia Location Tagger application. Click here to see the photos displayed on a map using OVI.

The video clips from the ecotour are posted below.

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P.S. Since this time I have been using another free application called FlixWagon, which like Qik allows you to livestream video, but will also archive the recorded video directly onto your OVI channel.

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