Sue Waters

So far in this week’s series on mobile technology in education I have discussed:

1. Are UMPCs Going to Convert Courses from Paper Based to Digital?
2. Mobile Web Usage is Increasing – How Will You Use It With Students?
3. You Need Spyglasses – Are you Serious?
4. Barcodes, RFID and NFC technology – use in education and training explained in Sue language!

With m-learning and mobile technology the choice is to either supply the mobile devices that the students use OR take advantage of the mobile devices that the student’s already have.

Ideally we should be taking advantage of the mobile devices that the student’s already have but how are we going to do this effectively?

Our reality is our students have different mobile devices with a wide range of capabilities (from only capable of playing music to web browsing, video calling, music and video downloads, and streamed TV).

Number and types of mobile devices in my class of 21 students is:

• 19 had Mobile Phones – phones ranged from very basic to 4 students with a Motorola V3X which is capable of web browsing, video calling, music and video downloads, and streamed TV
• 7 had PSP (PlayStation Portable) – the main use of a PSP is for playing games however PSP do supports music, video, photo, web browsing and wireless connectivity
• 3 had Video Ipod
• No. with mp3 players was not counted – but would expect to be high
• No.of digital cameras was not counted – but I should have

With their range of devices we can not use “one size fits all” approach instead we will need to use a range of m-learning approaches (e.g. podcasting, moblogging) while making sure we do not discriminate or disadvantage any student.

It is not possible to do justice to all m-learning using student mobile devices in this post – so I will be doing a series of posts on this topic next week.

QUESTIONS

• Are you currently taking advantage of your students mobile devices? If so, how?
• What issues do you have with getting students to use their OWN devices?