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@DIT 2014 