Teachers and Students: real-life mobile implementation with learners

October 09, 2013
10:00 am - 11:00 am PST
By Educator Innovator

When implementing mobile in learning environments, what do we need to consider about the relationships between adults, youth, and technology?

Key Questions and Comments:

  • (05:49) There is this kind of delineation or split, it seems, between mobile learning…where it may be in an academic setting but kids are actually going out and collecting data in their community or populating some sort of geolocative map, and then mobiles being just used as textbooks or a glorified flash card.
  • (10:29) Think about situated learning theory as it applies to mobile. If we take that learning theory and combine it with this media, it starts our brains going in all of the ways that we might use the affordances of this media.
  • (13:19) The more I started to look into it, I realized that not only could you use it to connect to learning inside the classroom, but it also connected students to everyday learning experiences outside of the classroom. Even further, it could be a powerful tool to personalize learning, which is something that is so incredibly difficult for teachers to do in a traditional classroom…
  • (18:41) I think “personalization” means that you can set students on a path. For example, a student could enter kindergarten when they’re developmentally ready and they could log in and set-up their kindergarten class with their counselor according to what that student’s abilities are…they could be doing work based around their needs and their passions.
  • (21:35) Whenever we set-up those contexts where people have more access to communities of practice and information, it fundamentally makes us rethink: ‘Well, what do we do in class that are different?’
  • (23:38) What’s the teacher’s role with this [device] that could conceivably undermine everything that they do?
  • (25:16) There has to be some way that the technology is enhancing the curricular learning goals…How is the technology extending [students’] learning beyond the school day? How is it allowing learners to learn on their own? If it’s not doing those things, then you really have to rethink whether it’s worth your time and energy…
  • (30:24) [At Technovation], we talk to [teams of 5 girls] about “How can you use this technology to solve a problem in your local community?…That makes girls think critically about what’s going and how they can address that through technology.
  • (33:52) By putting the student in the role of the designer, it opens up those questions about things like historic interpretation and primary sources, and some pretty complicated ideas…putting people in that role where it requires research and design and they’re producing, that inherently is an education process.
  • (42:06) I feel like we’re really at a turning point where a little bit of the general excitement around a new media or a new technology is starting to turn into very practical experiences from people that went ahead a bit.
  • (43:26) We use Bloom’s Taxonomy [to evaluate mobile apps for education]…it’s hard to find apps that get to that higher order thinking processes (Synthesize, Analysis Critique).
  • (48:16) What kind of stuff are [the girls from the Technovation Challenge] curious in making? What problems are they trying to solve?
  • (52:12) It really re-enforces that [mobile] is a tool to help increase quality of life. I think the more that youth see that, that mindshift happens.

From this Series:

View the Conversation
During the broadcast, the conversation also took place on Twitter using the hashtags #connectedlearning and #mobileed.

Guests for this webinar included:

  • Richard Scullin – Founder, MobileEd.org; Director of Mount Greylock Regional High School DML Lab
  • Liz Kolb – Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
  • Jenna Blanton – Director of Communications and Program Development, Iridescent
  • David Gagnon – Instructional designer, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Director, ARIS

Resources for this webinar:

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