Day 3: My venture
Quite a challenging task for Day 3! But you did get me to think more about m-learning.
-my problem? The need for practice. Everyone in secondary schools knows how tough it is to get kids to do their homework that provides the necessary practice.
-solution? -Maybe a series of games apps that targets concept practice – yes, this could look like drill and kill – but so does a lot of homework assignments anyway. Not easy to do high order thinking on a mobile device – maybe that could be the next “big thing”? At least students would be more engaged in doing their homework on their cellphones. (even I have to get used to that idea)
-my apps would be designed for BB since it has such a limited selection, ( I can’t give up on RIM just yet) but the marketplace would expand greatly if I could have it work with iPhones too.
-biggest challenge? getting my schools to abandon their antiquated no-cellphone policy!
Brenda
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Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
Deb Giesbrecht 5:21 pm on November 16, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Ahh yes….the no cellphone policy! For me it is the privacy and security policy – very good information and control of data, however, makes it very difficult to be progressive in today’s mobile society.
David William Price 10:14 am on November 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks for your post
Drill-and-kill is highly popular on mobile for test prep. I suspect it’s for the same reason drill-and-kill was highly popular with the beginning of e-learning. It’s cheap and easy to create and it’s easy to sell the benefits. When people are anxious, they tend to procrastinate and rely on rehearsal strategies to learn.
However, ask yourself how introducing authentic problems in the real world would affect understanding of the underlying concepts you’re teaching. What would happen if they had to go out and collect data (audio, video, photo) about authentic uses of the information you’re teaching… and collaborate with each other (texts, maps, calendars) to find the authentic examples and make use of them in some way.
Rather than forcing traditional learning into a tiny device… how do we use the tiny device to enable a different kind of learning?