iPhones in K-12

This is my first post from a mobile device, an iPod Touch. I’m investigating possible use of iPhones in K-12. I’d be interested in hearing your ideas.

MobClix

To follow up on what Tony Vincent said in his session with regards to the number of downloads in the App Store, MobClix has a dynamic page that keeps track of exactly that. It shows downloads by category as well as paid/free downloads, anywhere from the last 5 days to the last year.

Picks from the App Store

Tony Vincent hosted a free professional development session for ISTE’s SIGHC yesterday called, “Picks from the App Store”. The session lasted for about an hour and was very-well attended. For more info on this session, links to the archived video and the apps that Tony demonstrated, please see his blog post.

Image Credit: www.ISTE.org

Apple Exclusive Event for HHL members

Apple have contacted the Handheld Learning Community to offer members an exclusive opportunity to attend a free event they are hosting in London on March 12th. Here are the details:

The Rise of Mobility in Education

This event looks at the opportunity mobile IT devices give Educators to implement a stimulating 21st Century Learning infrastructure across their institution. More and more students are coming to school with mobile devices like iPod touches and iPhones. These devices provide easy, inexpensive access to virtually any Internet medium and augment notebook computers in exciting ways.

• How can you use these devices for constructive purposes in the classroom?
• How do they fit into an existing digital learning environment with notebook computers?

In this session, attendees will explore the models used to deploy mobile devices in the classroom. The briefing will be led by Gordon Shukwit, the Director of IT and Learning technologies group for Apple Worldwide Education markets. His team works globally with education institutions, government agencies and International schools as they define new learning environments. The event is aimed at Headteachers, ICT Leaders and Advisors from Schools and FE Colleges.

Date: 12th March 2009
Venue: EBC London
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm or 14:00 to 16:00

Attendance via registration only at
http://seminars.apple.com/goToSeries.html?id=8690&locs=uk_en

See also the thread on the HHL forum.

To Touch or Not to Touch….

Our research center has been looking into acquiring some iPod Touches to use with K-12 students in our research lab, the AT&T Classroom. I’ve been poking around on the web a bit, and collected some stuff that will help us in making our decision.

Personally, I think the iPod Touch has great potential for teaching and learning, both inside of school and out, and I really like the interface quite a bit. There is something about the tactile manipulating content on the screen with your fingers as opposed to having to use a mouse, stylus, or other input device (Think manipulating the world in Google Earth on a Smartboard with your hands. If you haven’t tried that, you should, it’s pretty cool).

I started by looking up some information about pilot projects at other education sites, and came up with (among the 174,000 hits I got off of Google):

Shepparton High School in central Victoria in Australia : where students used the devices for a variety of things. The most interesting quote from the short article is this one by the project’s lead teacher: “We assume that 14-year-olds are really technologically savvy, but they’re often not.” I think we tend to forget that. Here is also a discusson about a small iPod Touch project at another school in Australia.

Abilene Christian’s ACU Connected Project:  I blogged about this one extensively last week, when I saw their stuff at the Mobile Learning 09 Conference in Washington DC. They’ve done quite a bit in a short period of time, and I’m waiting to see what material they will be posting online from their own conference. I like what they are doing with the iPhone and iPod Touch with regards to communication with students, but I think that what they are doing is much more difficult to achieve in a K-12 environment, especially given the current hesitancy in K-12 for using any technology that allows students to communicate with each other and others outside of school.

In, “An iPod Touch for each student?”, there is discussion of Culbreth Middle School in Chapel Hill, NC getting iPod Touches. The story is accompanied by  some cautionary commentary by E.D. Hirsch (“”Technique and how-to ideas have taken the place of deciding what it is, exactly, we want these children to learn”) and a few other schools where the device are being used already. This project did get off the ground. Interesting quote from the Business Week article was made by AVID coordinator Chuck Hennessee who said

“one of the only negatives he has seen so far with the program is that students sometimes would rather use the iPods than work with each other. But he said that can be a plus, too, because it cultivates independence.”

Other than that, the project seems to be going well.

 

Some additional interesting sources include:

Tony Vincent has a section devoted to the iPod Touch on his Learning in Hand site.

Kathy Schrock wrote  a short series of posts on her experiments with an iPod Touch (lots of good info here, exactly the type of stuff I was looking for)

Chris Webb’s post,  “Why an iPod Touch in Education?”  with a list of apps and some additional pertinent information.

 An iPod Touch in Every Classroom by Kelly Croy, from Wes Fryer’s blog. Lots of odds and ends here.

And of course Apple’s Mobile Learning page,  and iTouch pages.

And that’s just the beginning. It remains to be seen (just like with any other “new” and “disruptive” technology) how quickly the iPod Touches will be adopted in K-12 and on what kind of scale. As I’ve said many times before, schools really need to start a serious discussion about how to integrate the use of student owned devices in the classroom, as it provides opportunities for learning that we currently do not really have (e.g. students in most mobile projects only have access to a device for a limited period of time, e.g. one year, and often only in school). Of course this type of implementation brings about a host of other issues, but that’s for another post …

Image Credit: “Touched” from littledan77′s photostream:
http://flickr.com/photos/pressthebuttononthetop/292518329/

RCETJ Special Issue on special issue on Multimedia, Media Convergence and Digital Storytelling

The latest issue of RCETJ is now online at www.rcetj.org (vol 4, no. 2). It’s a special issue on multimedia, media convergence and digital storytelling that was guest edited by Joe Murray, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication here at Kent State.

The issue contains ten articles on a wide variety of topics related to the issue’s theme and include such topics as the use of video as an aid to teach chemistry, iPods for language learning in higher education, media convergence in a college newsroom, using Second Life for research, teaching, and collaboration, eportfolios, a tool to track censorship and prior review of high school media, and digital storytelling as a gateway to computer science.

This issue is also the last one that was published under the editorship of Karen Swan. Yours truly will be taking over at this point in time. If you are interested in submitting a manuscript for publication (the Spring 2009 issue will be on blended learning), please visit the RCETJ website and take a look at the instructions for authors.

Image Credit: RCETJ: www.rcetj.org

An iPod Touch for Each Student?

About a week old, but still an interesting story about a roll-out of iPod Touch devices at a middle school in Chapel Hill, NC. While the article does not specifically state what the iPods will be used for, the principal has this to say:

“It’s a world we better figure out, because we can’t ask our students to come into a classroom, put those things aside and sit in a row and think we’re interesting,” she said.

“We’re just not that interesting.”

Of course there is the usual talk about technology being used as a tool to serve student learning, etc. etc. There is an interesting example at the end of the article about a school in Idaho that banned iPods because they were supposedly used for cheating. Is it just me or maybe we should be looking at new forms of assessment instead of falling back upon the usual ban and punish tactics?

And of course don’t forget to read the comments to the story, always enlightening…

Image Credit: “Stack of iPod Touches”, the Pug Father’s photostream,
http://flickr.com/photos/fleur-design/1472589193/

Handheld Learning Presentation Proposals Due Soon!!

On Friday, May 30, to be exact. I’m still working on mine, how about you?

So far, all indications are that Handheld Learning 2008 is going to be the best handheld learning conference yet. The list of keynotes is first-class, and it’s worth attending the conference just to see them. However, I’m mostly looking forward to see what will happen when 1,000 people or so all have access to the same device (a Nintendo DS) for the duration of the conference.

You can register for the conference here.

 Submit your presentation proposals here.

Image Credit: www.handheldlearning2008.com

Becta’s Emerging Technologies for Learning, Volume 3

Becta has just published the third volume in its series Emerging technologies for learning, an annual publication. This series is worth a read, and I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from it in years past. This year’s line-up includes articles on

• Growing up with Google (Diane Oblinger),
• Information clouds (yours truly)
• Location-based and context aware education (Adam Greenfield)
• Trends in serious games and virtual worlds (Sara de Freitas)
• Search technologies (Emma Tonkin)
• Interactive displays and next generation interfaces (Michael Haller)

Given the impressive line-up of authors I have to say that I’m proud and a little humbled to have been asked to contribute to the 2008 volume of the series. Highly recommended!!

Image credit: “nptechtag”; cambodia4kidsorg’s photostream:
http://flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/1343334854/

Mobile Roundup of Sorts

 As I’m trying to get caught up on my reading about mobiles and mobile learning, I run into all kinds of interesting odds and ends. Here is a brief roundup of some of the things I’ve been looking at lately:

Publications

WLE’s occasional papers #1 “Mobile learning: Towards a research agenda“. Edited by Norbert Pachler, this is an interesting collection of six papers, all arguing for the need for more theoretical work in the field of m-learning (and I would concur). Some work is being done, as is illustrated, example, by Wali, Winters, Oliver (“Maintaining, changing and crossing contexts: an activity theoretic reinterpretation of mobile learning” in the March 2008 issue of Alt-J; abstract is here), and earlier by Uden (“Activity theory for designing mobile learning” in the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation), and of course “A theory of learning for the mobile age“, written by Sharples, Taylor, and Vavoula for the The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research. 

Research Methods in Informal and Mobile Learning is a book of proceedings from a December workshop, consisting of 15 papers that explore how me might go about doing better research in the area of mobile learning. I’m still reading this one, but so far it’s been an interesting and I think important piece. I’ve always believed that as learning (and learners) changes so should our ways of researching it. I’m proud to say that even though I wasn’t able to attend the conference myself, I did contribute a presentation and a paper.

This is not so much a publication as it is a good resource for many things having to do with mobile and learning: mLearnopedia. I’m surprised I haven’t run across this before, trawling the net for mobile learning resources. This is a worthwhile resource, with lots of links to current news and events in mobile learning.

Mobile phones for learning

A while ago, Dean Shareski wrote an intersting post about using cellphones as learning tools with an accompanying video, describing an experiment with mobile phones to see  “Can this powerful device help students learn?” The answer for now is a qualified yes, I would say.

Here is a more recent article from eSchoolNews that discusses how institutions of higher education are responding to the iPhone’s popularity. While it is great that different institutions are beginning to cater more to mobile users, I think there is a real danger in what some institutions like Abilene Christian University are doing by focusing on one particular device. It’s the connectivity that counts, not the device that’s used for it, and who knows, we may laugh at the site of an iPhone in 3 to 5 years… As I’ve said before, the focus should be on providing content.

A whole other take on learning with mobile phones is described by Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, in his article “Reaching out through mobile technology with the humble SMS” Looking at the bigger picture of things, Ken describes some of his work with mobile technology in Africa. He argues that the three keys constraints to advancing mLearning in developing countries (and I’d add elsewhere as well) are mobile ownership, mobile technology, and network access. These are probably more constraining in developing countries because of a lack of alternative technologies (as for example is described in Dean’s piece).

However, as Ken Banks concludes:

Mobile technology has revolutionised many aspects of life in the developing world. The number of mobile connections has almost universally overtaken the number of fixed-lines in most developing countries in the blink of an eye. If further evidence were needed, recent research by the London Business School found that mobile penetration has a strong impact on GDP. For many people, their first ever telephone call would have been on a mobile device. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, their first geography lesson will be on one, too.

Student voices

Via Andy’s Black Hole, I ran across this video on BBC News, called Children’s love of mobiles. It’s about a group of kids in the UK who filmed the making of their video report about mobile phone use. As Andy says, it’s well worth a watch.

Another interesting piece is Next generation learning, produced by Handheld Learning for Becta. The video is a nice mix of children and adults speaking about  the use of consumer electronic devices and entertainment software for learning. A few notable quotes out of this one:

• “I don’t think there’s a big difference between learning and entertainment” (student) 
• “We need good teachers to keep up with this generation” (Prof. Stephen Heppell)

And while you’re on Handheld Learning’s Blip TV site, check out some of the other videos that are there.

Finally, for the funny story of the week, head over to Fox News for its story “Padded Lampposts Tested in London to Prevent Cell Phone Texting Injuries” and PollyPrissyPants comments entitled “Why don’t we just walk around in protective bubble gear?” Even though this story is a couple of weeks old, it was too good to pass up.

So there you have it, as the title of this post states, a mobile roundup of sorts…

Image Credits:

“The Brawley Roundup”; from independentman’s photostream:
http://flickr.com/photos/indieman/5858851/

“Padding to protect pedestrians” from
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080304/img/puk-1204650490-uk-e08f352d4-710cec94c9bc0.html