Mobile Learning
What Exactly Can You Learn on a Mobile Phone?
The mobile phone has been lauded as a tool with the potential to close the digital divide between the haves and have-nots. But what type of learning is best suited for a small mobile device?
How Californians Might be Closing the Digital Divide
For those who can’t afford or don’t have access to computers, can smart phones serve as substitutes? The question of whether mobile devices can close the digital divide between the haves and have-nots came up again yesterday with the release of a report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Among many other findings, the [...]
Games, Gadgets and the Cloud: Coming Soon to a School Near You
Cloud computing and mobile learning: That’s the way of the near future in education, according to the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition. Released by the NMC’s Horizon Project, the report distills current trends, challenges, and emerging technologies in K-12 education. “There are so many things to pay attention to in the [...]
Seven Questions to Ask About Texting in Class
Despite their ubiquity among students, mobile phones are still viewed as contraband in most classrooms. Students are told to turn their phones off, leave them in their lockers, or leave them at home. This response to what is arguably the most ubiquitous 1-to-1 computing device available in our schools today undoubtedly led many students to [...]
Parents Weigh In On Paying for Mobile Access in Schools
Would parents pay for mobile phones if schools allowed them to be used as learning tools? Most would, according to the recent Speak Up 2010 report — 67 percent of parents, to be exact. We took this data a step further and asked MindShift readers if parents would pay for data plans, specifically to be [...]
Should Schools Subsidize Mobile Phones for Kids?
If Project K-Nect is proof that at-risk kids benefit from access to smart phones (many of them, the founder Shawn Gross says, have gone on to take Advanced Placement math classes), what happens to those who don’t have smart phones? A reader asks: My question for the group discussion is that because many of my [...]
How Do We Address the Needs of Kids Without Mobile Access?
Flickr:Shlala The $64,000 question in education: Does access to mobile technology actually help close the achievement gap? Bill Ferriter, a sixth-grade teacher in North Carolina, has been thinking about this issue, and writing about it on his blog, The Tempered Radical. In this recent post, he addresses a question from one of his readers, who [...]
Can a Smart Phone Program Really Close the Achievement Gap?
Students from different geographic regions communicate socially, but also to help each other achieve the common goal of succeeding at Algebra 1. When asked what tech tools students would like to use in learning science and math, their reply was no surprise: “They said they wanted something that would utilize social networking technology — something [...]
Weekly News Roundup
By Audrey Watters March 8 – 10 marked the inaugural SXSWedu, an education technology conference held in Austin, Texas right before the main South by Southwest event that includes one of the most popular technology conferences in the world. SXSWedu was sponsored by SXSW and TEA, the Texas Education Agency and featured three days of [...]
Creating Mobile Learning Apps Adds Another Layer to Learning
I’ve written a lot about mobile learning – and there’s a lot more to write about because it’s a quickly growing and changing study. But today at the Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education Conference, I heard about the value of kids not just using mobile apps, but actually creating them. Chris Thompson, Associate Director Evaluation [...]
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