A school not far from Milton Keynes has started allowing pupils to text their teachers / mentors for help with revision.
The innovative idea does not give out teachers mobile numbers but gives a general number which then forwards queries to the teachers via a website allowing the teachers to monitor the site and provide progress.
Why is the scheme so attractive to the students? - I believe it is three things convenience, novelty and privacy.
BBC NEWS Education Pupils get revision help by text
Monday, June 12, 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
UK lecturer starts podcast only lectures
An article on BBC News , tells of a lecturer in northern England that has given up lectures and replaced them with podcasts.
One of his main motivations seems to be that he would like to spend more time focused on tutorials and small groups. He also believes that his students will review more of his content if they can do that where they want, and when they want.
I am intriuged by this idea and commend Dr Bill Ashraf at Bradford University for trying it out, I do have some questions though. Will he get more time with the students? Will this free up his time or initially will it take up much more time with technical support of problems, recording the lectures etc? I imagine next year things will be more effective as the lecture series can be re-run and that will free up a lot of time - but what about this year's students will they suffer?
I imagine that things will balance out this year as students will be able to "attend" more of the lectures and also review the content as they are struggling with concepts during their revision and assignment work.
One of the other ideas, submitting questions via text message, I am not so sure of. I will be interested to see how many people use this route rather than in person or via email.
Providing all answers via a blog though must again only help students who need to review work for revision and other work. The body of work in this blog will also help students in succesive years.
Good Luck Dr Ashraf - and should you happen to come across this note - please keep us informed of your progress.
One of his main motivations seems to be that he would like to spend more time focused on tutorials and small groups. He also believes that his students will review more of his content if they can do that where they want, and when they want.
I am intriuged by this idea and commend Dr Bill Ashraf at Bradford University for trying it out, I do have some questions though. Will he get more time with the students? Will this free up his time or initially will it take up much more time with technical support of problems, recording the lectures etc? I imagine next year things will be more effective as the lecture series can be re-run and that will free up a lot of time - but what about this year's students will they suffer?
I imagine that things will balance out this year as students will be able to "attend" more of the lectures and also review the content as they are struggling with concepts during their revision and assignment work.
One of the other ideas, submitting questions via text message, I am not so sure of. I will be interested to see how many people use this route rather than in person or via email.
Providing all answers via a blog though must again only help students who need to review work for revision and other work. The body of work in this blog will also help students in succesive years.
Good Luck Dr Ashraf - and should you happen to come across this note - please keep us informed of your progress.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
What might free wireless mean in the future?
Free wireless access is becoming more prevalent, this week New York city announced all of it's park areas would provide free wireless access. This trend is very interesting Philadelphia has announced plans to cover the entire city with free wireless, and other US cities are doing likewise (San Francisco another good example).
These trends are not just based in the US - Islington council in London has similar plans and other cities here are also looking into it.
The reasoning behind a lot of the free wireless access is to make sure that all of a cities population have equal access to information and services and that any "digital divide" is reduced. Brighton's council are putting together a wireless service to link up schools and remote offices cheaply, but also selling bandwidth to internet cafes, residents and businesses to help support this.
What might this mean for m-learning? At the moment when focusing on school age students our software does not rely too heavily on internet access. This is because the access they have to internet connections is limited and this is mostly because of the cost of connecting from a mobile phone to the internet. A new generation of phones is starting to provide wireless access along with normal phone connections, if the student can access free wireless then the internet can be relied upon much more.
Will this herald an age of connected/supportive learning with peers - perhaps "social learning"? Possibly - most computers today are internet connected and "social learning" has started to happen. Schools are now handing out home work via the internet and getting homework submitted via the internet. Students do use MSN and other chat programs to support each other during homework.
Perhaps the biggest aspect of "social learning" that mobile phone software will be able to foster will be motivation though competition, which can be quite important in motivating boys, by allowing them to publish their progress on a website.
Let's see what happens!
These trends are not just based in the US - Islington council in London has similar plans and other cities here are also looking into it.
The reasoning behind a lot of the free wireless access is to make sure that all of a cities population have equal access to information and services and that any "digital divide" is reduced. Brighton's council are putting together a wireless service to link up schools and remote offices cheaply, but also selling bandwidth to internet cafes, residents and businesses to help support this.
What might this mean for m-learning? At the moment when focusing on school age students our software does not rely too heavily on internet access. This is because the access they have to internet connections is limited and this is mostly because of the cost of connecting from a mobile phone to the internet. A new generation of phones is starting to provide wireless access along with normal phone connections, if the student can access free wireless then the internet can be relied upon much more.
Will this herald an age of connected/supportive learning with peers - perhaps "social learning"? Possibly - most computers today are internet connected and "social learning" has started to happen. Schools are now handing out home work via the internet and getting homework submitted via the internet. Students do use MSN and other chat programs to support each other during homework.
Perhaps the biggest aspect of "social learning" that mobile phone software will be able to foster will be motivation though competition, which can be quite important in motivating boys, by allowing them to publish their progress on a website.
Let's see what happens!
Friday, May 05, 2006
Primary Exhibition - first feedback from teachers
I traveled up to Manchester today to the Early Years and & Primary Education Exhibition Manchester 2006. I was there to get feedback from teachers on Alpha versions that we have of the Sums software for mobile phones.
This software has been built using content ideas from Sums Online, which is already being used in 700 UK schools. The Sums Online software covers 80 different aspects of the Key Stage 1 & 2 curriculum and we have adapted 4 of these games for the mobile phone to test usability and interest with children.
Whilst gathering feedback from the teachers we also had a questionnaire, which turned up some interesting results. The results of this survey can be seen on our site.
The feedback on the software gave us a few points that need to be refined, but most of these we already knew as it was the Alpha version. Overall the feedback was that teachers would recommend the software, once it was shown to have a positive impact on children's learning.
It positive to have a general acceptance from the teachers of the ideas. There were a few teachers who felt that children should not be encouraged to use phones anymore than they already do. The teachers who were resistant to the idea, did also say that they themselves should review their attitude to new technology as they couldn't see students putting the phones down and in that case it was better to have educational programmes being used.
This software has been built using content ideas from Sums Online, which is already being used in 700 UK schools. The Sums Online software covers 80 different aspects of the Key Stage 1 & 2 curriculum and we have adapted 4 of these games for the mobile phone to test usability and interest with children.
Whilst gathering feedback from the teachers we also had a questionnaire, which turned up some interesting results. The results of this survey can be seen on our site.
The feedback on the software gave us a few points that need to be refined, but most of these we already knew as it was the Alpha version. Overall the feedback was that teachers would recommend the software, once it was shown to have a positive impact on children's learning.
It positive to have a general acceptance from the teachers of the ideas. There were a few teachers who felt that children should not be encouraged to use phones anymore than they already do. The teachers who were resistant to the idea, did also say that they themselves should review their attitude to new technology as they couldn't see students putting the phones down and in that case it was better to have educational programmes being used.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Use Bluetooth to revise? Already happening
Whilst in Belgium for the weekend I met a geography teacher and we talked about some of the ideas motivating us at the moment.
He told me about a brilliant idea where students from different schools travel to The Hague to join a student version of the UN - see here for more details. He had recently taken a group who got the privilege of taking Israel's seat (each school represents a real UN country). The experience was eye-opening for both him and the students, seeing how they were treated by other "countries" and to reflect on Israel's history. I was very impressed with this idea and think that it is a fantastic opportunity for students to understand the UN and world affairs.
We also talked about mobile education ideas and since I have been back he posted me a link to this site: www.radicalgeography.co.uk and in particular this article.
Tony Cassidy the guy who runs the site, teaches in Nottingham and has been getting Bluetooth education going for a while in a nice and simple way. Teachers and students are creating small images that have text overlaying a picture which helps re-enforce a concept. These pictures are easy to create with standard windows software and are made small enough to be seen on a mobile phone screen.
Bluetooth is then used by students to swap the images between each other. As we have seen in our interviews Bluetooth is used in schools already by most students for messaging and file transfer, so this is a nice way to make sure it is used positively.
There is no mention on the site about how successful the idea has been - but I look forward to more news coming out from there.
He told me about a brilliant idea where students from different schools travel to The Hague to join a student version of the UN - see here for more details. He had recently taken a group who got the privilege of taking Israel's seat (each school represents a real UN country). The experience was eye-opening for both him and the students, seeing how they were treated by other "countries" and to reflect on Israel's history. I was very impressed with this idea and think that it is a fantastic opportunity for students to understand the UN and world affairs.
We also talked about mobile education ideas and since I have been back he posted me a link to this site: www.radicalgeography.co.uk and in particular this article.
Tony Cassidy the guy who runs the site, teaches in Nottingham and has been getting Bluetooth education going for a while in a nice and simple way. Teachers and students are creating small images that have text overlaying a picture which helps re-enforce a concept. These pictures are easy to create with standard windows software and are made small enough to be seen on a mobile phone screen.
Bluetooth is then used by students to swap the images between each other. As we have seen in our interviews Bluetooth is used in schools already by most students for messaging and file transfer, so this is a nice way to make sure it is used positively.
There is no mention on the site about how successful the idea has been - but I look forward to more news coming out from there.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Interviewing today's students
In the course of our research we have been interviewing students at Sir Frank Markham school in Milton Keynes.
The interviews have turned up two unexpected points so far:
1.Only 40% of the students interviewed had mobile phones.
2.The use of Bluetooth by students in the school is huge.
The first was a surprise as the national statistics suggest that 95% of children in this age range have mobile phones - and this has been a basis of some of our assumptions. We believe the 40% is related to the sample of students (10 out of 300). We will compiling a full survey of the 300 Year 9 students in the near future to find out if this is a trend across the entire school.
The second point is of much more interest as our current software designs make no use of Bluetooth. We have assumed Bluetooth would only introduce set up issues and complications, especially between different handsets. We are now thinking of ways to engage students using Bluetooth - but still create personal learning spaces.
The high usage of Bluetooth has lead us to think carefully about activation of software. Using Bluetooth means that our software could appear on mobiles who have not paid for the software. As complimentary as this would be is it also an aspect we need to think about to make sure that our ventures and ideas can keep us properly rewarded.
The interviews have turned up two unexpected points so far:
1.Only 40% of the students interviewed had mobile phones.
2.The use of Bluetooth by students in the school is huge.
The first was a surprise as the national statistics suggest that 95% of children in this age range have mobile phones - and this has been a basis of some of our assumptions. We believe the 40% is related to the sample of students (10 out of 300). We will compiling a full survey of the 300 Year 9 students in the near future to find out if this is a trend across the entire school.
The second point is of much more interest as our current software designs make no use of Bluetooth. We have assumed Bluetooth would only introduce set up issues and complications, especially between different handsets. We are now thinking of ways to engage students using Bluetooth - but still create personal learning spaces.
The high usage of Bluetooth has lead us to think carefully about activation of software. Using Bluetooth means that our software could appear on mobiles who have not paid for the software. As complimentary as this would be is it also an aspect we need to think about to make sure that our ventures and ideas can keep us properly rewarded.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The BBC - help or hinderance?
As we are analysing the market for mobile software we are looking at various angles - students motivations to use the software, parents desire to pay for software and teachers support for ideas and approach. Our research is also looking into competition and pricing for software and this has raised an interesting question - Is the BBC going to help or hinder us?
As UK residents we are all licence fee payers and therefore we fund the BBC, and on questions of the value we get for that licence fee we are happy with the TV and Radio broadcasts and the extensive access that the BBC has given us to news and all it's other content via the BBC website.
We have also read stories relating to complaints about the BBC and it's effect on competition and innovation in certain markets - newspapers, television companies and publishers. The general feeling after reading these stories is that the BBC should continue to publish it's content online and not hold content back. Holding content back would only mean that companies would sell similar content to us, even though we have already paid for it.
Our perspective has changed now we can see that the BBC is commissioning mobile content for education - and the question for us is how much will this impact on Luzia. If the BBC is giving software away for free - can we compete?
Will the BBC, by experiementing in this area, highlight to a wide audience the benefits of using these techniques? Will they take our ideas and their great resources and commission work with us? Will they encourage larger organisaitons into this area?
At the moment we are unable to see the effect the BBC is having, only over the next year will it become apparent, for the moment we welcome the BBCs work and hope it helps create demand for mobile educational tools. We hope this involvement is kept to a minimum and once they have helped promote this area, they make sure that their activities do not create an environment that stiffles innovation.
As UK residents we are all licence fee payers and therefore we fund the BBC, and on questions of the value we get for that licence fee we are happy with the TV and Radio broadcasts and the extensive access that the BBC has given us to news and all it's other content via the BBC website.
We have also read stories relating to complaints about the BBC and it's effect on competition and innovation in certain markets - newspapers, television companies and publishers. The general feeling after reading these stories is that the BBC should continue to publish it's content online and not hold content back. Holding content back would only mean that companies would sell similar content to us, even though we have already paid for it.
Our perspective has changed now we can see that the BBC is commissioning mobile content for education - and the question for us is how much will this impact on Luzia. If the BBC is giving software away for free - can we compete?
Will the BBC, by experiementing in this area, highlight to a wide audience the benefits of using these techniques? Will they take our ideas and their great resources and commission work with us? Will they encourage larger organisaitons into this area?
At the moment we are unable to see the effect the BBC is having, only over the next year will it become apparent, for the moment we welcome the BBCs work and hope it helps create demand for mobile educational tools. We hope this involvement is kept to a minimum and once they have helped promote this area, they make sure that their activities do not create an environment that stiffles innovation.
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