U-Blog 6

Mobile Phones For Education

(M-Learning)

One thing you can almost guarantee is that pretty much every student you come across will have a mobile phone. In what follows I’m going to try to outline a few ways in which we can use the technology students already have to make life easier, and enhance learning.

1. Learning slideshows for mobile phones and iPods

In this post I looked at ways in which PowerPoint presentations can be saved as a series of images of a size and format suitable for screens of mobile phones or iPods. This is especially useful for revision purposes as students tend to use our phones when waiting or bored. This gives us something productive to look at.

2. Setting up an Educational Blog

If you’re setting up a blog-based website, you might as well make it mobile device-friendly. Most sites run on Wordpress and has the WP-Mobile plugin installed. This means that mobile phones are automatically detected and suitably-formatted pages displayed. Students can then access a website through the school computers, their home computer and their mobile phone - so they’ve got access anywhere.

3. Using technology students already have for learning

I’ve managed to post to a blog I had on Blogger via my iPhone by sending an email to a specified email address. You can share files with others via Bluetooth and transfer pictures and videos via USB to a PC. Imagine the possibilities: field trips where students post to their blogs/wikis while they’re there; creating mini-documentaries using the camera in their phone; be in different places working on the same project and be talking via instant-messaging; the list goes on.

4. Podcasting/listening to educational MP3 audio

Mobile phones are more and more becoming ‘entertainment devices’. However, this means that they have the software we can use in education to engage even more. Some mobile phones can already subscribe to podcasts and a fair few can listen to streaming MP3s from the Internet. Even if these features are missing, pretty much every mobile phone you can buy now can be hooked up to a computer and have MP3s sent to it to listen to on the go. Why not use this feature, combined with a website, to either publish work, or to extend the course beyond the four walls of the classroom?

5. Sharing files via Bluetooth

Given the amount of time students spend using their mobile phones it’s fair to say most have likely to come pretty adept at using them; just because you don’t know how to use all the features of your phone doesn’t mean that others don’t. For those living in a cave, Bluetooth is a networking protocol, a way of sharing files and information over a short range (a few meters). Most laptops, such as my HP, have Bluetooth built-in. As mobile phones become more and more powerful I can say we have reached a time when students can submit their homework to an instructors device at the start of a lesson, from their phone. We already email homework, so this seems like a natural extension…