What is the position of your workplace regarding the use of mobile devices in the classroom/for learning? Who is allowed to use mobile devices: teachers, students? What for?
My workplace is an elementary school (Grades K-5). The school encourages the use of iPads but there is no provision for smartphones and tablets for students. Additionally, the grade 3-5 students are in a 1-to-1 Mac program, while the K-2 students have access to a laptop cart and a computer room with PC computers.
Teachers are asked not to use their smartphones in the classroom. Video and photos of learning should be taken with the class cameras or an iPad. However, many teachers chose to disregard this rule since their phones are already synced to upload files automatically to the school Google Drive.
Students use the iPads for a variety of learning experiences: from educational apps (across all subjects) to creating movies with iMovie or animations with the app iMotion and a variety of other purposes. My students are currently in love with the game Pet Bingo for practicing operations such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.
What are the obstacles?
The obstacles that we face are minor. The school has a limited supply of iPads, and they must be booked in advance. There are no iPads that belong to an individual classroom.
The second obstacles are the memory size of the iPads. Since the devices have a large number of apps on them, there is little storage space for videos. When students create movies using iMovie the Photo Album usually needs to be erased first to have enough space to record the videos needed to make an iMovie. Additionally, at the end of each month, all iPads have all photos deleted.
Are there any success stories?
Success stories are numerous. In my Grade 2 classroom, our third Unit of Inquiry was about technology. The summative assessment was for the students to make an instructional video using iMovie to explain how to use one of the apps that we had learned during the Unit. It is quite interesting to watch the planning, recording and editing ability of students who are only 7-8 years old. The assessments were well done overall. We watched the series of instructional videos in a film festival atmosphere to celebrate our learning and as a way to peer assess each others work.
How does the use of mobile devices change the way we teach and learn?
Mobile devices offer so much to teaching and learning. From choice to self-paced study/ review, a mobile device can assist in giving differentiation in tasks and assessments thus our school is able to address some of the factors of motivation that the Ciampa paper discusses. Students are now creators rather than workbook or worksheet completers. This is just the tip of the mobile device iceberg.
References
Ciampa, K. (2013, 08). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82-96. doi:10.1111/jcal.12036