Mobile Learning
The Future of Tablets in Education: Potential Vs. Reality of Consuming Media
By Justin Reich The Someday/Monday dichotomy captures one of the core challenges in teacher professional development around education technology. On the one hand, deep integration of new learning technologies into classrooms requires substantially rethinking pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher practice (someday). For technology to make a real difference in student learning, it can’t just be [...]
Parents Want Kids to Use Mobile Devices in Schools
Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices have gained popularity as educational tools in part because of the belief those devices could cut across the digital divide created by socioeconomic boundaries. Now a new study reinforces that perspective, finding that students’ access to mobile devices, in this country anyway, is more often a question of parents’ [...]
How to Help Mobile Education Go Global
For many of us, the conversation around mobile learning has shifted from asking whether mobile devices present educational opportunities to how they might best do so. From that second question, a new initiative has been launched: SMILE, the Stanford Mobile Inquiry Learning Environment, an idea, which, in practice, is almost staggeringly simple. Essentially, SMILE is [...]
What Will It Take to Bring Mobile Ed to the Developing World?
In developing countries, where smartphones and dependable cellular networks are still scarce, it’s been difficult to gauge the real impact of the mobile education movement. But with the combination of different factors — the advent of new technology, decreased pricing for data, a worldwide lust for mobile education, and a persisting patience for smaller screens [...]
Case Studies: How Teachers Use Tech to Support Learning
Erin Scott Starting the year off with ideas on the best ways to use technology to support learning, Larry Ferlazzo collected an invaluable list of criteria last year from educators, to which he added more resources in his recent blog post for EdWeek.Other posts in the series include Using Ed Tech to Create Deep and [...]
Top 10 Posts of 2012: Deep, Meaningful and Creative Learning
Flickr: CriCristina It may come as no surprise that the ideas that are top-of-mind for educators, parents, and policymakers are the very topics conveyed in the most popular MindShift posts this year. Giving kids the tools to create, teachers the freedom to innovate, making students’ work relevant in the real world, giving them access to [...]
Four Smart Ways to Use Cell Phones in Class
Erin Scott By Jennifer Carey A good rule of thumb for any classroom use of cellphones: the lesson/activity must be engaging as well as productive. You don’t want technology for the sake of technology (and students aren’t going to be intrinsically fascinated with a device they use routinely when they’re outside of school). If the [...]
10 Important Questions To Ask Before Using iPads in Class
Lenny Gonzales By Terry Heick When it comes to deciding how or whether to use iPads, schools typically focus on budget issues, apps, networking logistics, check-in and check-out procedures, school and district tech-use policies, hardware precautions, and aspects of classroom management. But it’s also important to think about instructional use, and to that end, consider [...]
How to Launch a Successful BYOD Program
Erin Scott By Katrina Schwartz As more schools start to integrate their own mobile learning strategies and Bring Your Own Device policies, one school district in a suburb of Houston has managed to come up with what appears to be a successful BYOD program. Katy Independent School District (ISD) has a student population of 63,000 [...]
Best Practices for Deploying iPads in Schools
Flickr: Lexie Flickinger By Matt Levinson As schools get ready to deploy iPads this year, each one is scrambling to figure out how to develop an efficient and effective system that works. With no standardized system or uniform roadmap to follow, at the moment, it’s up to individual schools to reach out through their networks [...]
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