Day 1
What, when, where and how are you doing m-learning now?
For the most part I use mobile learning in the classroom when I allow my students to use their cell phones as a dictionary or to look up some information. At first I struggled with this as I felt that it was ‘cheating’ but the more I thought about it I realized that this was part of their everyday lives and I was giving them the tools to operate in their day to day lives. However, I drew the line at tests as I wanted to know what my students capabilities were not their cellphones capabilities.
I also once tried to do a survey where students answered the questions on their cellphones and the results were supposed to show up real time but sadly it didn’t work so I never tried it again.
For myself, I’m always excited about mobile learning and I’ve downloaded many apps to learn German on my iPhone and for my A1 I analyzed a grammar app I would like to use for a reference when teaching my students in a classroom.
Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
David William Price 1:20 pm on November 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The whole “cheating” issue fascinates me.
It seems to me the way to deal with cheating is to remove activities that are biased to knowable right answers. If students engage in highly-contextual and personal activities high in Bloom’s Taxonomy, you can reduce the ability and likelihood of cheating. The results have to apply to them personally and rely on creativity and assessment and evaluation related to their own backgrounds and experiences.
For instance, in the course a TA for, the assignment that is usually best done by students (low cheating, plagiarism, high creativity) is one where they have to create a procedure to explain how they did a job they had in the past. They include pictures, they conduct tests of the procedure with co-workers, and they report on improvements.
To me, cheating is not a technology issue, it’s a pedagogy issue. I’d be thrilled if my students used any technology available to perfect their grammar and spelling before submitting an assignment. As for resources, as long as they cite, I’m happy.
Everton Walker 3:59 pm on November 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Tamara,
Very interesting. Is it a case where your students independently use their mobiles for learning purposes? I have to remind my students that they can use theirs for other purposes a part from social networking.
Everton