EdTechGeek

Our capstone project is off to a strong start.  We have had 2 virtual meetings.  Our lesson will be designed as a professional development unit for teachers. The focus is using mobile technologies to obtain formative assessment data.  We have chosen our apps and assigned topics and apps to review. I must confess to being the airhead of the group, because I completely and entirely missed our first GHO.  But, in the true spirit of collaboration, both Dale and Greg provided me with an overview of their discussion we quickly reached consensus on the focus. Whew, sometimes working full-time, being a PhD student, a mother to three teenagers (+ one adorable poodle puppy) and building a new home just gets the best of me.  Did I mention that I moved this weekend?  Oh no, not into the house, because after 10 months, IT IS STILL NOT DONE.  But out of the rental and into the Residence Inn, because .... ah who cares why.

In education, not real estate, does location matter? In a 2009 study by So, Seow and Looi they find evidence that mobile learning devices paired with Web 2.0 tools can link formal and informal learning environments to engage students in participatory learning.  The key concept is that knowledge learning occurs in situ not necessarily in a formal classroom setting, it is personal and in context.

Mobile devices (think smartphones and tablets) allow users to create content and construct knowledge in real time. The built in features of the devices (image and video capture, note taking, wifi, etc…) coupled with an

app like Dropbox allow the student to capture, record, research and share their experiences.  Dropbox will let the user upload, publish and share files.  The content is not bound to the device, but to the cloud.  It provides anytime, anywhere access from an internet enabled device.

Location does matter.  Meaningful and relevant learning can take place in both formal and informal learning environments.  Students need to be allowed and encouraged to participate in the learning in any location. Learning experiences need to be structured to leverage the affordances of mobile devices and Web 2.0 tools.

Works Cited:

In my job as an Instructional Technology Facilitator I spend a lot of time vetting iOS apps.  We have multiple iPad learning labs and over 200 iOS devices that I manage.  It’s difficult to determine the very BEST iOS apps, but here are five great IOS apps for learning:  Adobe Photoshop Express, Numberline, Penultimate teamed with Evernote, Educreations and PixNTell.

Adobe Photoshop Express

This app allows the user to take images from the camera roll and edit them and then they may be saved back to the camera roll to import into other applications. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. Students love to take photos with the built-in isight camera and then edit them before sharing or using them in other apps.  I've used this with fourth grade students that are working on a North Carolina ABC book/wiki. Super easy and fun!

Numberline

This is one of my favorite apps. It lets students practice ordering decimals, fractions and percents on a numberline. I think it is great mental math practice and good at developing number sense.  A good fit to the fifth grade curriculum, where students are asked to compare and order fractions, decimals and percents.

Educreations

Educreations is a digital whiteboard that allows the user to record their work on the whiteboard (or a picture).  The app takes a screenscast (with student’s voice/audio) of the work done on the computer screen.  Our third and fourth grade students use this during their math workshop time.  After they get in groups to discuss how they solved the focus problem, one student in each group takes of picture of their work, and records how they solved it with the interactive tools (annotating and recording audio).  Then, each of these are shared on the Smartboard via an app on the teacher’s laptop called airserver.  Airserver allows wireless mirroring of the iPad onto the teacher laptop via Airplay.

Penultimate with Evernote

Need to take notes?  What I love about penultimate is that I can take pictures of handouts and then annotate the picture with notes from the class.  I do this all the time in my face to face classes.  I HATE it when professors hand out papers (I can’t keep up with them, seriously!).  Penultimate syncs with my Evernote account, then I have access to these files on all my devices.  LOVE IT

l

PixNTel

I think I'm in love

It's gotta be love

It surrounds me

Over me like a sea of

madness

It controls me.

Remember Eddie Money? I recently suggested to my teenage daughter that I felt like she was in love with her iPhone.  She is never without it.  It goes in the bathroom with her,  she plays music on it (loudly) while in the shower, plays games on it (while watching Netflix on her iPad), it is her alarm clock and this is just the beginning. Teens and tweens love their mobile phones. I am researching mobile device learning tools for class and I discovered Class Pager.  I think I’m in love.

In Larry Lui’s AP Psychology class he found a way to use powerful mobile digital tools with his students, even though their use is ban during the school day.

Northville, Michigan Level High School

Ap Psychology is a high school course I know well. My daughter is currently taking it through North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS) and my son took it two years ago.   Despite the online environment, the course seems “flat” to me, more of a class that is typically taught in a classroom and simply “converted” to an online format. It is little more than a recorded PowerPoint lecture and online discussion postings. Good web-based instruction requires the teacher to “re-engineer” her practice and design a course that incorporates 21st century skills and tools, as well as authentic formative assessments..

Larry Liu, in his face-to-face high school class, incorporates many of the digital tools his students use in their personal lives. He offers students an engaging way to apply their learning and “show what they know.” Liu teaches in a school where 98% of the students have personal cell phones, the majority of which can send and receive MMS (multimedia messaging service) messages. The students in his school demonstrate a high level of proficiency in both reading and math (85% and 82%, respectively). Lastly, the parents of his students tend to be at least high school graduates and a majority are college graduates.

The relatively educated population of parents and accessibility of personal mobile devices can be assumed to support his innovative approach to teaching.  Liu’s practice is to have students connect and document what they see in their everyday lives outside of school to the concepts learned in class.  The “documentation” is in the form of digital photos and video captured by the student’s cell phone.  The students upload this content to a class Facebook group.  This practice affords the learner the opportunity to apply their knowledge and to collaborate with their peers. Their classmates have the experience of affirming or challenging the connection/application, building on it to extend the learning.

Liu’s practice provides the student with meaningful and authentic learning opportunities, the learning is situated in life, not just in the classroom. The students are excited and motivated to participate. Importantly, he extends his instruction beyond the course content to lessons on digital citizenship.  He helps his students to understand their digital footprint and its potential implications. Lastly, he engages in an authentic and purposeful form of formative assessment.  After Liu reviews the posts his students make he can easily see any misconceptions and take corrective action. Liu does a commendable job of addressing the International Society for Technology Educators (ITSE) Nets. This activity requires reflection and collaboration, promotes good digital citizenship and gives the instructor an opportunity to gain formative assessment data.  

One weakness in his practice appears to be a lack of flexibility in work product.  Since the case study in Liz Kolb’s book, Cell Phones in the Classroom: A practical guide for educators,  is a rather short summary, it may be that the write-up does not go into detail about the non-digital options for expression. As a parent of high school students, I understand why his approach is successful.  It seems a rather brilliant practice to leverage the powerful pocket computing devices the students already own and a way to connect with them, in their preferred medium with their social networking tools. I witnessed something similar to this with my daughter’s other AP course this year, AP Art History (I know, she’s really challenging herself!).  The students receive extra credit if they photograph themselves in front of certain architectural styles or features (recently it was an example of gothic architecture), these are posted to a Facebook group page.  Hmm, wonder where the teacher get this idea …. Bravo!

Case study from: