Mobile Learning: Teaching for Tomorrow

“If we teach today as we taught yesterday,

we rob our children of tomorrow.” John Dewey

 I have written about this quote before, and I love how it reminds me that teaching is a dynamic career.  Teaching is not something you “get good at” so you can coast through the years.  Excellent teachers are always learning and constantly adapting the tools and techniques they use with their students.  As the world changes and technology evolves, these teachers embrace these changes and bring new tools and techniques into the classroom.

As I write this post on my laptop, I am checking out new education apps on my iPad and keeping in touch with my sister through text messages on my cell phone.  I am also downloading pictures onto my desktop to share with my friends and family in my Dropbox account.  Besides being a stellar example of my multitasking, this shows how technology-saturated my life has become (and this is a typical weeknight for adults and kids in many homes.)  Today’s technology allows us access to an almost unfathomable amount of information across multiple devices 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Should this access be limited to the home, or is there a place for this mobile technology at school?

Navigating a touch screen is becoming second nature to kids as young as toddlers.  The preschool set is learning their ABC’s through YouTube and interactive books and flashcards.  Kids are sharing pictures, creating videos, and chatting real-time with far away friends as they play video games together. It seems like a shame not to harness the learning that can come from these types of interactions.  By bringing some of this mobile technology into the classroom, we can help the school environment more closely mimic the world outside the classroom walls.

Even if you are completely convinced that bringing mobile learning into your classroom would be great, the logistics of actually doing this can be overwhelming.  It would be great to have a class set of iPads, iPod Touches, smartphones, or tablets, but getting them is not an easy task. A discussion of ways teachers have made this happen deserves a post of its’ own later on.  Before we get into that, I want to share some neat things you can do with these kinds of devices in your classroom.  If you don’t have a class set of devices but want to dabble in mobile learning, you could make many activities work with one mobile device at a station for your students to rotate through.

I am limiting the following few examples to the iPad for simplicity’s sake. This isn’t to say that the iPad is the only or the best mobile learning tool out there; it is just a very popular device so there is a lot of discussion in the edublog world of iPad apps for the classroom.  Please comment if there are other mobile devices you would like to discuss in the future.  We want to help you succeed in bringing mobile learning to your school!

What are some FREE mobile learning tools you can use in your classroom TODAY?  Here are a few free apps I have come across recently. Many thanks to Kelly Tenkely at iLearn Technology and Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers for always keeping me in the loop with their wonderful blogs!

Demibooks Composer is a new, free app available for the iPad.  Basically, this is a tool that will allow your students to create interactive e-books for the iPad.  Very cool!  Students that enjoy being creative and teaching others with their work will have a lot of fun with this app.   Kelly Tenkely describes it best here. 

Another handy free app for education is Evernote, an app we discussed in the past for helping teachers stay organized.  It can also keep students organized, and it is a great way to archive student work and save paper.  With Evernote installed (for free) on a mobile device, students can capture audio, pictures, and their own writing.  They can keep all of this organized into folders and they can send their notes directly to the teacher for assessment and collaboration.  Evernote is also available on the Android market, and works with a PC or Mac.

This interesting free app is called Show Me.  In the spirit of resources like the Khan Academy, Show Me will allow students and teachers to create all different kinds of online tutorials with an iPad.  As a person who learns best by teaching, this is a very exciting idea for me.  This app could be very useful for allowing your students to help and tutor their peers and as a way for you to assess student learning. 

One very creative teacher even figured out how to bring the ever-popular Angry Birds to the classroom.  Her plan used the game to teach math, history, and science.  I love how this idea works across several subject areas and brings in a popular game that students are already interested in.

There are so many more free apps for the iPad that would be a great addition to the classroom.  I hope this start of a list gets you excited and thinking about how some type of mobile learning would benefit your class.  Watch our Facebook and Twitter pages all week for more helpful discussions and resources.  There are plenty more resources and ideas on the Gateway, so be sure to search there, too.

~Peggy's Corner - October 13, 2011~

On the Go: Mobile Learning

Until recently, schools banned the use of cell phones and other mobile devices by students during class hours. While some students argued that the devices could be helpful to the learning process, teachers and administrators focused instead on those students who used the devices for non-learning related tasks, such as texting their peers and trolling the Internet.  Although the abuse of mobile devices by students is still a valid concern, some enterprising educators have embraced mobile technology and are increasingly incorporating it into the curriculum.

Mobile learning, or m-learning, is related to distance education and e-learning in that each method uses forms of technology to enhance the learning process. Mobile learning, however, focuses particularly on learning with mobile devices such as tablets, cell phones, and iPod Touches. Mobile devices have the advantage of being small, easily portable, and familiar to the vast majority of teachers and students alike. Their inclusion in the curriculum opens a wealth of possibilities, as students don’t need to be tethered to workstations or even a classroom as they explore concepts relevant to their learning anytime, from just about any location.

Last fall, Project Tomorrow released a report about technology and education at a Congressional Briefing in Washington, DC. Their research found that 64% of teachers surveyed believe that mobile devices could be beneficial for increased communication among parents, teachers, and students, as well as be used to access online textbooks at any moment. The same study also asked K-12 students to envision what going to school would be like in 2015, and many foresee classes where mobile devices are integral to the teaching and learning process.

There are numerous accounts of teachers effectively using mobile devices in their classrooms, and perhaps more schools will ease their current restrictions on use of the devices during school hours. Using devices such as iPads and smart phones can help address the need for students to acquire 21^st century skills, and also help to foster increased student-directed learning.  This week, I’ve selected three resources that bring mobile technology into the classroom in meaningful ways. Each of the featured resources below is from Apptivities, an organization that aims to support teachers in using mobile applications effectively to improve student learning. We’ll also be featuring lots of new lessons and resources on mobile learning each day throughout the week on our Facebook and Twitter pages, so be sure to check those pages regularly.

Historical Detectives

http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2011-09-28.1656118109

Subjects: World History

Grade: 1-6

Using iTouches or iPads, students will use images to draw conclusions about ancient civilizations. In addition, the students will add captions and speech bubbles to ancient civilization images in order to explore their background knowledge on the subject and/or to summarize information they have learned from the chapter.

Dictating Foreign Language Fluency

http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2011-09-28.9585057880

Subjects: Foreign Languages (also ELL)

Grade: 6-12

An essential part of improving student’s fluency in a foreign language is providing practice in speaking. However, for practice to be effective, students have to receive feedback on their pronunciation skills.  This apptivity is designed to give students an opportunity to document their fluency improvement.

To Kill a Mockingbird

http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2011-09-28.4540014188

Subjects: English

Grade: 9-12

In this To Kill a Mockingbird project idea that uses iPads, the importance of perspective is first introduced through Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph and is reinforced through images of the Jim Crow era.  As a final project, students are asked to personalize Atticus Finch’s famous quotation about the importance of “walking in another’s shoes.”  By shadowing an acquaintance for a two-hour period, using the pedometer and GPS features to track their physical movement and voice memos and notes to create an interactive diary, students will develop their own sense of empathy and reach a deeper understanding of Harper Lee’s famous novel.

~Joann's Picks - October 13, 2011~