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

I had an interesting experience this week that challenged a lot of what I write about. The students were working on research for a project I have them working on. With only two extra computers in the classroom, there was a line of students waiting to access online sources. While the students were working I had a student pose a question. He had a phone with internet capabilities, and was wondering whether he could use it to study. I almost immediately said no, but I thought about it instead. Considering that our school’s policy states that use of personal electronic devices is at the teacher’s digression, I said yes… but that the student had to keep it where I could see it at all times and told him that all rules regarding internet access at the school would apply. He agreed.

He immediately hopped on to Wikipedia. This was his first problem. Not because it has often unreliable sources.(He was researching Metal music, something that is probably better suited for wikipedia than most) The problem was the speed with which the pages were rendering. So I pointed him to wapedia.mobi which is a version of wikipedia for handheld devices. From that point he was locked in and ready to go. Considering the student, he undoubtedly did a whole lot more reasearch from his phone than he would have done on any full size computer simply due to the fact that he was doing something that no one else was doing. Would this feeling wear off? Probably, but not that day.

There could have obviously been some serious problems with this scenerio. He could have started texting his friends or visiting uneducational sites. This of course is why I had him by the other computers, keeping it where I could see it. Considering that rules haven’t been hashed out for this type of use, a number of things could go wrong. The point here is that as technology gets better, the more we can stop taking away the tools that students use on a daily basis and start finding ways to harnass it, we could find ourselves easing the strains on our technology starved schools.

How do you feel about this? Problems, ideas? Leave them in the comments.