When will we be ready?

This is a question that I ask myself regularly about mobile phones in the classroom. The rooms are ready, phones can last all day without a charge. The children are ready, see earlier posts regarding how they were recently used for speaches in our school. The phones are ready, they all now have a good quality browser and memory and this is not a problem as they can use the fantastic Operamini browser, which can be used on almost any phone. The real problem is when you ask the children about getting the web on their phones, they all say it is way too expensive. At the moment the best deal is with Vodafone NZ which has recently introduced a $1 a day for 10Mb on prepay. I won't even mention Telecom NZ as you would have to take out a second mortgage, just to browse Facebook.

What we have to face is that in the short term, phones with built in wifi will remain expensive and that the majority of children (who have a phone) are on prepay, it's good for them and definitely good for thier parents. So until the network operators come to the party and offer better prepaid data plans I am still  going to be asking "when will we be ready?"