I've posted before about embracing cell phones in education. That idea is coming closer to reality. I just know that I'm throwing my million dollar idea out the window. I also know that the edublogger community has a MUCH greater chance of pulling this together.

If you've been following the NECC chatter you've certainly read about how Twitter was the "rookie of the year" application. See posts from Jeff Utecht and Ryan Bretag.

David also has ideas churning about educational applications of Twitter.

Here's what's on my mind and I hope that the programmers out there can help.

As I visited the NECC exhibit hall, the "clicker" vendors were very popular. You know the ones where teacher posts a question and student use a $50 remote control unit to respond. A classroom set can be had for ONLY $2500-$3000.

So here's the alternative:

1. Teacher and students establish Twitter or Jaiku accounts.
2. Teacher adds students as friends.
3. Teacher poses a question on Twitter as part of the lesson being delivered.
   
4. Students respond using Twitter. The answer could be a simple ABCD or could be short answer.
5. Responses come filing in on the teacher's screen.

So there are privacy concerns with this. There are equity concerns (not all have phones, not all have text plan, etc.) I'm certain there are concerns with policy as well. Many schools have banned cell phones.

The idea here is that we're not far from a $3000 system for effectively ZERO.

I'm not ready to discuss the educational value of the clicker systems. That's an animal of its own. Fact is, classroom response systems can help to engage students in the learning process, even if it's only the first step.

So what do you think? Can a Twitter-like app be tweaked to create a classroom response system using a browser and cell-phones? Why not? What about those one-to-one classrooms?