Yet Another Global K-12 Success Story

Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris recently blogged Hong Kong School Leads the World in Cellphone Computer Use after visiting Pui Ching Middle School in Hong Kong. Students are currently using cellphones to help learn English and current events, but are also moving to use them for math and Chinese.

Pictures are available here. It is easy to see how engaged and happy the students appear to be.

The good news is that now when I talk with organizations about mobile learning, the questions have moved from "why?" to "how?" It seems to be a given that we are all moving in this direction, but the questions are what can we learn from others who are already "there?" This may well be a great example for K-12 to follow.

Mobile ESL

Athabasca University in Canada has released their English as a Second Language course for mobile under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

There are eighty-six sections, each with exercises. Their hope -- according to their video -- is that non-English speakers from around the world are able to access it on their mobile devices and use it to learn English.

Access is via a browser at http://eslau.ca. They hae also made the source code available for download.