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.

iPods in the Classroom

Just discovered a publication with lots of good information and suggestions for using iPods in the classroom. Enjoy!

Open publication - Free publishing - More technology

New School Alert System

This week I received a message from Jonathan Hoover about a new application his not-for-profit organization had released. I do not recommend products, but thought that this sounded like something that may be of interest to school administrators reading this blog. Note that I have not tried it, but if you have a need, it should be worth a look.

Through Schoohoo (www.schoohoo.com) he and his wife programmed an application to deliver free school alerts to schools of any size and at any grade level "From Preschool to Ph.D."(tm).

Alerts are sent via text message and email to parents, students, faculty, staff and others in the community about emergencies, but also weather closings, holidays, other days off, registration dates/times, PTA events, and the like. Parents can sign up themselves, so the school doesn't have to maintain the database. There will be a short advertisement included, or an advertisement-free version is available starting at $500 per year.

Check it out and if you try it, please let us know how it works.

Mexican Mobile Learning Initiative Info

Tecnológico de Monterrey has implemented a large mobile learning initiative and has posted a YouTube video. Check it out here. 

Most is in English, but when a speaker is Spanish, there are subtitles (even though they are not that easy to read.)

A Visit to Abilene Christian University

Today I was excited to visit the folks at Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Abilene, TX, to talk about mobile learning. Their ConnectEd initiative has been well covered in just about every publication that covers education and technology, plus they have shared a lot of information through their website and blogs. I have followed ACU since I first saw their video last year and all was pretty well as I had expected. Lots of students with iPhones or iPods and lots of activity.

I was unable to attend their sold-out conference at the end of February due to another commitment, but all their materials are (or very soon will be) on their ConnectEd Summit 2009 site.

As a bit of history I learned that, like other institutions, ACU had been looking at laptops and tablets for students. At a group meeting to discuss ubiquitous computing, someone asked how are we going to restrict these cell phones? 98% of the student population used these devices. Luckily rather than to outlaw or otherwise restrict them, they embraced them and supported the constant connectivity.

The excitement of the faculty and staff to think outside the box and better prepare students for the new connected world was impressive, plus the members of the team were very open and willing to consider new ideas. When I arrived they were discussing the new integrated curriculum they are planning. They continue to think of how they can improve the student experience and are anxiously awaiting the news tomorrow of version 3.0 details for the iPhone.

What I didn't expect to be impressed by was their library. They have created a very active center where students can talk aloud, collaborate and receive assistance. They can also grab a cup of coffee or drink from the Starbucks right in the library. There are areas for students to receive help with their writing, presentations, research, and technical issues. There is even a copy center. What they are planning on the floor above is to expand this center for assistance with creating videos, audio or other types of multimedia and to integrate these materials into their presentations and other work.

If you get a chance to visit them or attend one of their next conferences, I would definitely recommend it. In any case, keep your eyes on ACU as we can all learn from them.

M-Learning Game Report

Thanks to the folks at Games, Learning + Society (GLS) in Madison, I just discovered "Experiencing the Past through the Senses: An M-Learning Game at Archaeological Parks" by Carmelo Ardito, Paolo Buono, Maria F. Costabile, Rosa Lanzilotti, Thomas Pederson, and Antonio Piccinno, University of Bari, Italy.

"M-learning—the combination of e-learning with mobile technologies—captures the very nature of e-learning by providing users with independence from the constraints of time and location. To exploit the potential of mobile technologies for learning, researchers must define new teaching and learning techniques. The Explore! m-learning system implements an excursion-game technique to help middle school students (ages 11 through 13) acquire historic knowledge while playing in an archaeological park."

The full 5 page report is available here. Unfortunately when they scanned it, the last page came out quite dark, but it is an interesting read.

Kindle on the iPhone

Last week I met with a great group from a middle school in San Antonio, TX, about mobile learning. The conversation came around to school in the future and I mentioned "Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns" by Clayton M. Christensen. I did not have my Kindle with me, as I usually don't carry it unless I will be on an airplane for a long flight. (No I don't have the new version of the Kindle, or I may have been carrying it with me.)

In any case I could not remember some parts that I had marked with a highlight.

That won't happen again; as of this morning I downloaded the new free Amazon Kindle application to my iPhone and within seconds I had access to the books I had purchased from Amazon and could now view them on either device -- and sync them between each other should I read on the iPhone and want to continue on the Kindle or vice versa.

The scrolling is to the right or left -- not up or down and there are options to change the font.

I do use my Kindle for reading PDFs rather than to print them to paper, but Amazon did not have those to transfer. Now that would really be great. For now I definitely will look more favorably to purchasing more books on the Kindle.

Is this mobile learning? Perhaps not, but I would consider it mobile performance support and a very useful and exciting development.

New Zealand Mobile Learning

In searching for some reports from the recent Mobile World Conference in Barcelona I ran across the Unitec New Zealand wiki and a wealth of information on mobile learning initiatives in New Zealand over the past three years or so. There are presentations, videos, slideshows, discussions and numerous references.

Let's see now, where does a person even start? I know that it will take me some time to peruse, but wanted to share these wonderful resources now.

The initial site updated last week is MobilePedagogy2 - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MobilePedagogy2

Other New Zealand mobile learning materials can be found here:
Mlearning Workshops - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearningWorkshops
MlearnBlogging - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearnBlogging
MlearnMovingmobile - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearnMovingmobile
MlearningOverview - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearningOverview
Mlearning Trials - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearningTrials

French Mobile Learning Site of Interest

Philippe Steger just emailed me information about their academic mobile learning initiatives in France.

The abstract of the project is:

Since more and more pupils have their own mobile/cell phones and are attracted by sophisticated low cost - 1 €-mobile/cell phones, new ways of getting learning and teaching resources can be offered to both pupils and teachers. Mobile/cell phones tend to become Personal Assistants.

The chance for pupils to get complementary lessons, short documents about health and orientation, recorded messages and question papers anywhere and at anytime (on the bus, at home or in study rooms) lead to extended fields of research programs. Besides WAPEDUC allows pupils to learn or revise during their spare time (http://www.wapeduc.net/)

The number of families connected to the Internet is still low if compared to that of families possessing one or more mobile/cell phones.

The main interest of this system lies in the fact that it is opened to everyone and it is quite cheap.

The aim of this innovative teaching strategy is to allow any pupil to get information about the contents of his/her future lessons and to self-assess himself/herself at the end of each lesson by means of an interactive question paper. Furthermore a search engine and a “training” program and a page devoted to teenagers’ problems are available on the “mobile learning” platform.

Other projects such as short texts which pupils could read before attending class, the presentation of sketches and diagrams, mathematical reminders, recorded messages and videos used in language lessons, can be considered as efficient and well targeted tools which prove to be complementary to school lessons.

Pupils choose themselves the moment when they want to consult the platform. This autonomous behaviour is resourceful and can lead every pupil to use the platform at the end of each school week.

For the time being, the learning platform offers 4 main themes:

- Lessons and self-assessment question papers
- Advices concerning orientation for studies
- A page devoted to domestic phone numbers for Health and advices.
- A culture program
The teacher and its pupils can communicate: the teacher upload resources from a computer and the child consults them on his cellular.

If numbers indicate success, he indicates that "The experiment is being conducted among 120 pupils in Primary School, 1400 pupils in Colleges and 4000 students (20 forms) in colleges in Montpellier Académy. Only in the Hérault Département the number of daily connections can vary from 1200 to 1700. After the Baccalauréat 2008, we had 92.000 pages viewed on 6 days."

Unfortunately my high school French has not been used and long ago forgotten, but you can view the site as I did through Google translate here. I have long been following mobile projects in the UK, but know I need to look at more European and Asian initiatives.

Thanks and Congratulations, Philippe!

Call for Action

I have always enjoyed visiting the Boston area, but now I really wished that I lived closer and could attend the new MAS.968: Call4Action studio seminar at MIT. Wouldn't it be great if they were to offer it online? So many very exciting mobile initiatives are occurring worldwide that are changing lives every day, but unfortunately we don't hear about most of them.

The class meets weekly over the semester with the goal "to expose participants to a variety of models for mobile and participatory systems."

By the end of the class, we hope to collaboratively create new sociotechnical repertoires for social change and technical activism. In order to foster this creation, we aim to provide participants with overviews of the conceptual, technical, and historical space for mobile technologies in social change.

We will provide an overview of contemporary mobile and participatory technology and techniques, and cross-fertilize that with theory and best practices around social movements.

Visit the course description here for a long list of recommended readings.

Thanks to mobileactive.org for the heads-up.

2009 Horizon Report Focus on Mobile Learning

Yesterday the New Media Center (NMC), along with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), released their 2009 Horizon Report. This 36-page annual report identifies Mobiles now with a time-to adoption of one year or less, from the two to three years identified in 2008.

The executive report states:

“Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly. New interfaces, the ability to run third-party applications, and location-awareness have all come to the mobile device in the past year, making it an ever more versatile tool that can be easily adapted to a host of tasks for learning, productivity, and social networking. For many users, broadband mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to assume many tasks that were once the exclusive province of portable computers. ”

You can download the report here.