Live Mobile Tech Test with Pupils

This morning I used my Year 7 class to test some mobile learning applications that I have been working on. I wanted to see if the use of mobile technologies were feasbile for real time use in a lesson.

Method
For this lesson, I wanted to teach the pupils a method of product analysis known as ACCESS FM. This is a national strategy activity in Design Technology which I am very familiar with. This allowed me to focus on the use of mobile devices without worrying too much about the lesson content.

Firstly I set up a class blog. This can be found by clicking here

I then asked pupils to work through the tasks on screen.

Range of Devices



I provided the class with access to several laptops, both PC and Mac, an O2 XDA Smartphone and a Palm Pilot TX (pictured above).

All devices were wi-fi enabled and could connect to the internet.

Embedded Media
I used the blog to facilitate the delivery of the lesson. As I moved through a class discussion, I asked pupils to record thoughts in the comment sections of the blog.

In addition to this, students listened to a sound clip where I explained what the students had to do. Next, the year 7s watched a video which gave more intricate detail on the lesson's task.

This showed the capability of the mobile devices to stream both audio and video to individual handsets.

Results
To conclude, I asked the pupils to comment on how they found the day's exercise. I used a Poll (tested earlier in this blog) to document. Students submitted their answers via mobile devices and the results were as follows. I fed this back to the class using the interactive whiteboard, this was easy because the blog system updates automatically and is accessible from classroom computers just as easily as hand held devices.



Although there were some teething troubles with the devices (the O2 XDA in particular proved difficult for children to use), the systems I put in place worked fine.

The most important factor I found from conducting this experiment was that video and audio must be fomatted correctly and the blog page must be designed in such a way that it loads quickly on hand held devices.

I will research further uses and devices in future posts. But for now, be sure to look at the Year 7 blog page from today's lesson.

- Kev Shirtcliffe