Tag Archives: geocaching

alt, facebook, gloucestershire college, podcast, youtube

e-Learning Stuff Podcast #078: My Digital Footprint

2 Comments

So what is your digital footprint? Where can others find you online? What can you do about other people who post stuff about you on services such as Facebook, Google+ and the Twitter. Are you CMALTed? How many apps do you have on your iPhone?

With Zak Mensah and James Clay.

This is the seventy eighth e-Learning Stuff Podcast, My Digital Footprint.

Download the podcast in mp3 format: My Digital Footprint

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes

Shownotes

  • Not on Facebook? Facebook still knows you.
  • Facebook announces that you can use video calling within Facebook.
  • Search for Gloucestershire College on YouTube and you might find this video hidden in the results, it use to be the number one result!
  • Not yet open to all, but we talked about Google+.
  • If you are a learning technologist you may be interested in becoming a Certified Member of ALT.
  • If you want to make notes on the move, have a look at Evernote which is available for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 as well as OSX, Windows and through a browser.
  • The most expensive iOS App James has bought is TomTom for the iPhone.
  • Audioboo lets you record and publish audio files along with an image the the geodata.
  • It was a normal busy Friday morning in the small West Yorkshire market town of Wetherby when someone working in a café spotted a man acting a bit suspiciously on the street. He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.  Geocaching: the unintended results.
  • JISC Digital Media
  • There are various magazines available for the iPad including Empire and Wired.
  • Zak’s personal website.
iphone

Geocaching with the iPhone

1 Comment

This is the first guest post I have had on this blog. Mick Mullane from Yorkshire Coast College is a mobile learning innovator whom I only actually met for the first time at the original MoLeNET Launch Conference at the Oval back in September 2007. Since then in our roles as MoLeNET Mentors we have worked together on supporting MoLeNET projects and have delivered a fair few workshops for MoLeNET as well. At the mLearn 2008 conference I found out that Mick does Geocaching, here is his post.

Geocaching is a worldwide fun activity that combines navigation with clue solving and treasrue hunting skills (google it!)

Since the introduction of the iPhone 3g and it’s GPS capabilities geocachers have been crying out for some practical applications on the iPhone, rather than just being able to find a skinny latte around canary wharf…

Given that the web browser is so good it makes it a breeze to log on to a geocaching website like www.geocaching.com and find some caches.  Ok the website doesn’t know where you are so you have to enter your postcode, or if you are a full time geocacher, your coordinates.  Once you have done that you can search for caches nearby, or ones that take your fancy.

That’s one of the joys of geocaching – takes you to places you would never think of going and gives you lots of local knowledge and history – it’s like a real world wikipedia…

Anyhow once you have selcted the cache you want to hunt then click on the google maps link at the bottom of the page.  The integration on the iPhone is such that it will drop a pin at the location of the cache on google maps, you then either work out your own way to the cache or ask google maps for directions – which could be interesting in the middle of a field somewhere…

It works very well…

Download the movie from here.

Drawbacks are that you need a signal – there’s no permanent maps stored on the phone, they have to be downloaded.  Indeed it’s a shame that we can’t get OS maps on the device yet like you can on a windows mobile device…  but hey it’s an iPhone, apprantly they can do other fun things too like games and music…

Mick Mullane