Why Use Mobile Devices in Education and How?

Now that mobile tools like smart phones, tablets, laptops have become one of our limbs especially Smart Phones. How do we spend your time on our Smartphones? An article on Telegraph says people spend average 2 hours with their mobile phones each day. Why not use this opportunity to teach? Making phone calls is just the fifth popular thing to do with your mobile phones according to O2 mobile network company. Thanks to evolution of mobile data transfer technology (WAP, EDGE and finally 3G) faster communication is made possible what’s more evolution will go on with 4G, meaning even faster internet connection.

Teachers tend to turn almost every occasion into a learning opportunity and also complain about the shortened attention span of kids due to ads, computer games etc… in which something new keeps coming or gives the message in a short time.

For me, one important aspect of teaching is trying to help the student to be an autonomous learner and as we all are highly experienced students and know how to learn or unlearn.

 

Using Mobile Technology You Can:

1. Prepare your own materials.

2. Use already available materials

3. Integrate into your classes.

 

1. Prepare your own materials:

• Prepare your own document, videos, tutorials, blog and have a paid or free web storage such as Google Drive and Dropbox that enables you to share downloadable files.

• The key is to keep it short, simple and interesting  as much as it can. (American Ad Council radio commercials are great examples of short, simple and interesting)

 

• Remember to prepare mobile device compatible materials, meaning small size yet good enough to hear, see or watch.

A good example of Visual Aided Listening activity by Katy Perry – Roar (you can also prepare a similar one)

 

2. Use already available materials: (are not limited to subject based materials)

• Find a language level appropriate material with the content or object you want to be learnt. Youtube videos,  movie trailers, direct teaching websites, and songs.

• Share the link of your resources with students.

• Search application availability of materials on mobile platforms (iOS or Android or Windows)

 

3. Integrate into your classes: What to do in class?

• Find  (including non-educational) end product activities (to see the students practice what they have learnt) Those can be the homework sheet you were planning to give, song compilation, acting and recording a specific topic.

• Use mobile devices to create stress free lesson which allows editing, deleting so to say practising until the best.

• Encourage them to be creative and publish their work.

Doing these is not easy though. Most important drawback is that students may not be interested in those end-products based on performative skills. I like the idiom “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” Let’s go back to the roles of a teacher, I guess another aspect of teacher comes into picture “role-model”. I wanted my students to compose a song and sing it using an iPhone application. But as said in the movie Titanic “you jump, I jump” so I jumped for good and wanted my students to follow my example. I composed a song (am not proud though) and surprised my students, some even cried. 🙂 And they all followed (happily ever after:)