The service is called trapcall and here is what lifehacker.com has to say about how it works. “TrapCall works like this: When you reject or miss a call, your phone forwards those calls to TrapCall’s toll free number (you have to follow TrapCall’s setup guide to do this). Once sent to TrapCall, the service works its magic on the missed call and then re-routes the call back to you, this time with the caller ID unblocked. If you reject the call a second time, it’ll go straight to your normal voicemail. On the caller’s end, all they hear during this whole process is ringing.”

Setting this up is free and requires no additional software, though ATT and T-Mobile are the only carriers supported as of now. I decided to set it up on my phone and suprisingly set up is dead simple. It sounds too good to be true, and for all we know it just might. The service could be gone tomorrow, but I figure I’ll use it while it’s around.

If you’re wanting more information, several sites have been covering the story. You can check it out at lifehacker and wired.

www.trapcall.com

Kevin MacLeod over at www.incompetech.com has produced tons of high quality music segments that served as a priceless resource for adding great music to each of the projects. Since scoring films/commercials etc… require fitting music to the feel of whatever is taking place visually, the search by mood feature allows you or your students to find exactly the sound they need. There is of course a search by genre option available if a certain style is required. Price? Just give credit where credit is due according to his faq.

Budget Idea

Consumer grade video cameras are cheap these days, and most schools will have one on hand. What most schools won’t have is a production level way of recording the audio. The solution? Silent Film. Windows Movie Maker actually puts together quite a nice little silent movie, and armed with the tracks from Kevin here is what you can do.

Video the students acting out whatever scene you wish.

Dump it into Windows Movie Maker.

Apply the Gray Scale and Film Age Filters to the video(which not only adds to the style, but covered for the fact that we had a really cheap camera.)

Slice the video and place plain black screen titles with an Old Timey font.

Head over the incompetech and download the appropriate tracks, and you’ve got yourself a nice little silent film.

Let me know if you and your students put one together. I’ll post it for all to see.

As a teacher working in a computer lab, J became the goto guy for all types of questions about technology. He took these questions and turned them into a service for teachers to help train them to be more fluent with those machines that sit on the their desks. The service is based on 180 short emails(one for each day of the school year) that answer these questions posed by  teachers. They provide quick painless training for topics covering hardware, software, and other general use situations. I could imagine that schools wishing to better train their teachers on how to use their machines could benefit a lot from these lessons, especially since they don’t require any more than 5 or so minutes a day. (Something that is a lot better than the after-school PD alternative.) As a matter of fact, it fits our School Improvement Plan quite well.

Here is a short description taken from his site.

180TechTips.com offers 15 hours of free computer training in 180 easy to follow 5 minute lessons.  This isn’t a boring 15 hour lecture.  We aren’t going to lock you in a computer lab for 2 days of ineffective staff development training that leaves you more confused than you were when you started.  This is the kind of relevant and uncomplicated computer training everyone needs.

You can check out the list of tips offered and check them out one by one, or by signing up for the daily email. Signing up, is easy, free, and with no strings attached. You can visit the site at 180techtips.com.