Final Comments

The Mobile Learning Project @ DIT 2014 has now come to an end formally. Yesterday the group presented their work at the annual DIT Showcase of Teaching and Learning Innovations and it was an interactive, lively, interesting session and the initial feedback from the attendees has been great.

Kathy Young and Dan King kicked off the session focusing on ‘student engagement’ and discussing the effect their mLearning projects had on that. Ann Hopper, Colin Freeman and Aidan Meade followed this with demonstrations of Coggle.it and Socrative as well as how to wirelessly connect an iPad to the projector and the advantages this can have for boosting interactivity and engagement in the classroom. And finally, Sara Boyd and Trevor Boland looked at more discipline specific apps. Sara demonstrated ‘noise’ apps and explained how she has been using them with students and then Trevor talked about the app he built to support the students he works with via the disability services.

All that remains to be said now then is a big thank you to Ann, Trevor, Colin, Sara, Aidan, Dan and Kathy who took part in the mobile learning project this year – they were a pleasure to work with and I’d like to wish them every success in their future projects.

The 12 Apps of Christmas

We have moved well beyond the point where we use our mobile devices to access information only, instead we are using them increasingly to create content whether we realise it or not. The connected world we now live in provides learners of all ages with the opportunity to learn all the time, wherever and whenever they want, facilitating authentic learning opportunities.

Tablets and smartphones are becoming standard learning tools in many classrooms, lecturer theatres and labs and adopting mobile devices in this environment is becoming a must.

Here at DIT we’re running a free and open short (12 day) mobile learning CPD initiative here soon . If you think some of your colleagues might be interested in registering please feel free to advertise it amongst them, and beyond, if you’d like. The more the merrier!

It’s called ‘The 12 Apps of Christmas’ and it runs for 12 consecutive weekdays starting on Monday Dec 1st. I’ve set up a wordpress site at http://the12appsofchristmas.wordpress.com/ and it will run from there. It’s aimed at lecturers and each morning a password protected page will be released on the site and that page will focus on a new app for each of the 12 days. A short description of the app will be given, and suggestions as to how it could be integrated into their learning, teaching, research and assessment practices will be provided. And an optional task will be available also so that if the app is of interest to them they can undertake the task and that’ll get them started using it. Where appropriate additional resources will be available too. The whole thing should only take them 10 mins a day.

So, 12 apps, 12 consecutive weekdays, 12 great ideas and 10 mins a day!

Anyone interested can learn more about it on the website and can register there too at http://the12appsofchristmas.wordpress.com/register-here/

Any conversations that the apps might generate can be followed at #12appsDIT.

Workshops and Showcases

Haven’t had a chance to blog all month! I really shouldn’t be chasing after the project group to blog when I’m not posting anything myself 🙂

All the projects are coming long nicely so it’s time now to think about some upskilling opportunities for the group – something for ourselves as it were. So we’ve decided to dabble a little in app building and develop some basic skills in the area. We’ve been very fortunate in that a fellow DIT lecturer has expertise in this area so he’s facilitating a workshop for us in December. I’ll blog any tips and hints I pick up at that.

And we’ve been asked to present about the projects at the annual DIT Learning and Teaching Showcase that’s due to be held in January 2015. There was huge interested in that session at last year’s Showcase, so the pressure is on! With so many projects to talk about this year, however, everyone won’t have time to speak so we’ve decided to create and show a video montage about the projects instead. After showing that we can field some more specific questions in relation to them, as well as directing Showcase participants to the group’s blogs. Once I’ve that video created I’ll share it here.

And finally, well done to Sara Boyd, Aidan Meade and Colin Freeman who presented their mobile learning projects earlier in the month to their colleagues in the College of Science and Health – there was a lot of interest from the attendees in what they are doing, some of whom were inspired enough to go on themselves since to use tools such as Socrative.

Reading for the week: Wondering how you could use mobile technologies to enhance the learning experience? Then read this Good Practice Guide (UCISA) detailing 6 mobile learning case studies.

My OLC Recognition of Mastery cert!

Nice to have this 🙂 It was in interesting course and I learnt loads. Would recommend it. If you’re interested in mobile learning you should follow the course hashtag on Twitter (#OLCmobile) because there is so much shared there by course participants and it’s all relevant and on topic.

 

 

The heat is on!

The mobile learning 2014 group had their second meeting last week and this is the first chance I’ve had to update the blog about it. It was a very interesting meeting where a huge amount of information was exchanged both technical and otherwise. It was great to get an update too on how everyone’s projects were shaping up. Some of the group were starting to use mobile learning technologies such as Socrative for both formative and summative continuous assessment this week so get reading their blogs over the next few weeks and see how they are getting on – you might be inspired!

Ethics Approval? If the group want to carry out some research surrounding their project and think they might want to publish their findings, they will have to apply for ethics approval from DIT’s Research Ethics Committee. It would be absolutely brilliant to see some publications from their work.

Write a book chapter even? On a related note, a Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning, to be published with Springer, is in the pipeline and the last call for chapter proposals has gone out. I spotted it advertised in the Technology in Education group on LinkedIn. If you’d like more information contact Aimee (aimee_zy@hotmail.com) . The final chapters are due for submission at the end of the year but interest, and your chapter title, needs to be registered now.

 

Building your own app for free

I just came across this  – https://www.eteachingapps.de/. Eteachingapps was developed specifically for Higher Education. Here you can build an app for your students for free, and it’ll be accessible across all operating systems. No programming skills required. Sounds brilliant. Must try it out!

The easiest way to find the apps you need for Teaching and Learning

edtechteacher has is all sussed here. Just choose whether you want to search apps according to the device you have or according to the activity you have in mind, and a list of suggestions appears, all ranked already for you in order of ease of use, usefulness and price! How easy is that?! So basically, you’re only 3 clicks away from finding that perfect app. No excuses now.

Oh how I wish I could draw!

I came across this really cool free iPad app this morning – Paper by FiftyThree. I really, really wish I could draw! I can see so much potential for use with students – sketches can be tweeted or sent by text and you can get your virtual book of sketches printed for you! I guess it’s not much good without the pen though…and that costs about €60. Em. Only a very small catch for what you could produce though.

Using Socrative to support the Flipped Classroom Approach

It has been a while since I’ve blogged about my work on the Mobile Mastery course – I’ve had the head down trying to get through the assignments to be honest! As part of those assignments I’ve planned a 3 week mobile learning course/CPD module, and fleshed out a lesson plan for week 1 of it. Now I need to work on and complete plans for the final two weeks and then see if I could run it to raise awareness amongst the staff at DIT of the power of using mobile devices in their teaching practice.

These last two weeks I’ve been searching for examples of how mobile devices can be used to support and facilitate formative assessment strategies specifically. One example is the work Simon Lancaster is doing in this regard. I was at a session recently where he spoke about his use of learning technologies to enhance learning, teaching and assessment and he was very inspiring. He encourages his students to tweet about what they are learning and tweet pics from their chemistry labs and share these with experts in the field who invariable get involved and retweet and/or reply. These ‘conversations’ are then archived by using Storify for future reference. He also uses and encourages the flipped classroom approach, but as well as flipping lectures he also flips roles and harnesses the power of peer instruction, assessment, and feedback. If you have a few minutes, read this article ‘Flipping Lectures and Inverting Classrooms’    – it’s a really great short article that explains how the flipped approach works in a practical way. But what I loved about this article is that they also explain how to build in a successful formative assessment strategy using a free mobile based audience response tool, like Socrative, and how that can enhance interactivity. But they don’t stop there – rather they go on to give an example of how the data gathered live via the audience response tool can be used to move the process on further and facilitate peer instruction.

 “When a cohort of students returned a range of answers to a multiple choice question, the students then found someone nearby they disagreed with in order to exchange explanations before the question was polled again…”

Mobile devices can play such a huge role in facilitating and encouraging learning, so why aren’t we using them more?!

Mobile Learning Resources: All on one page!

Sometimes blog posts can be annoying to have to trawl through just to find that one link you remember seeing there months ago! So, I’ve created a new page on this site called ‘Interesting Resources’ (see menu bar above) and I’m going to copy in there every link I put into my blog posts as well as links to interesting apps that I come across while working with the mobile learning group @DIT, and on the Mobile Learning Mastery Series.