Posts Tagged ‘mobile learning’
Mobile Learning Presentation for the 4T Virtual Conference
I presented Experiential Mobile Learning at the 4T (Teachers Teaching Teachers About Technology) Virtual Conference. I am all about sharing, so here is a version, an agenda, of what I presented.
Introduction: Epic Learning Activities
With a background in experiential education and as an advocate of John Dewey, I believe that learning experiences should be, borrowing from the game world, epic.
The following video is viewed with participants asked to describe the characteristics of the learning activities shown in the video. Participant reactions are posted in the webinar backchannel.
Questions to assess the “epicness” of learning activities:
- Was there an experiential component?
- Was it engaging?
- Was it an authentic, relevant learning experience?
- Did it facilitate critical, reflective thinking?
- Did the learning activity change behavior or thinking?
Participants join and access Cel.ly to discuss their own Epic Learning activities.
Overview of Session
The session is divided into three components:
- Research of the importance of building community and social interactive into the learning process.
- Mobile device use patterns by young people.
- Sample experiential mobile learning activities – active participation.
The Research and Its Implications for Mobile Learning
Information about the importance of building community in the classroom is shared from the following resources.
- Creating a School Community http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar03/vol60/num06/Creating-a-School-Community.aspx
- Key Elements of Building Online Community: Comparing Faculty and Student Perceptions http://jolt.merlot.org/vol3no3/vesely.htm.
- The Process of Community-Building in Distance Learning Classes http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v5n2/v5n2_brown.asp
- Exploring the Challenges of Supporting Collaborative Mobile Learning www.irma-international.org/viewtitle/60139/
Research about mobile use patterns is shared from the following resources.
- Pew Research: Teens, Smartphones & Texting http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Teens-and-smartphones.aspx
- Pew Research: Just-in-time Information through Mobile Connections http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Just-in-time/Main-Report/Findings.aspx
- Educase ECAR Reprot: Mobile IT in Higher Education, 2011 Report http://www.educause.edu/ECAR/MobileITinHigherEducation2011R/238470
- My End-of-Course Student Survey https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/mobile-learning-end-of-course-student-survey-part-ii/
Participants share implications of the research on own teaching strategies via Cel.ly.
Sample Mobile Learning Activities
I Am Poems
- Example I AM Poems are shown via http://www.slideshare.net/jgerst1111/i-am-poems
- Participants are provided with directions about how to write a poem (https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/mobile-driven-identity-activities/), upload it with a picture via email to my Flickr account, and then view at http://www.flickr.com/photos/78773858@N03/
Participants are encouraged to respond on each other’s photos/poems . . .
QR Video Sorting Activities
- Participants are walked through the steps of the QR Video Sorting activity http://community-building.weebly.com/qr-video-sorting-game.html
- They are asked to access their QR code reader and given the challenge to guess which nonverbal behaviors were demonstrated via the student created videos.
Additional References are provided:
- Experiential Mobile Learning Activities website http://community-building.weebly.com/
- User-Generated Education blog posts tagged with mobile learning https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/tag/mobile-learning/
- Mobile Learning Reflections http://community-building.weebly.com/
Presentation Slides
The Magic of the Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
I have written about the power of Comic and Animation Technologies in the Classroom. Because of the Academy Awards, I was introduced to the beautiful, animated The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore that has so much potential for classroom uses. What follows is the 15 animation and a description of the iPad storytelling app that tells the interactive story.
As is my tendency, I tweeted and Facebooked my excitement for this animation and others responded.
Extension Activity with an Interactive Storytelling iPad App
Through the creators’ ingenuity, they developed an amazing iPad app to go along with the video.
There are lovely filmic perspectives on each page, hand drawn illustrations that fade to 3D digital animation and the interactivity makes you feel like you are part director of your own animated short (The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a Game-Changing eBook App).
The app includes pages of the story with text and 3D animated illustrations with an option to have audio narration of text.
The text can be translated into various languages.
Each page also has a “secret” embedded interactive that the user needs to discover. This one is a keyboard where the user can follow along and play Pop Goes the Weasel.
Further Reading
QR Coded Student Videos: Classifying Activity
This is part of my continuing series of blogs about how I am integrating mobile learning into my undergraduate course on interpersonal relations. There are a dozen students in the class. Ten of them are in the 17 to 21 year old age range. The other two are over 35 years old. All of them own mobile devices – four of them being Smart Devices (iPhone, Android). Three of them bring their personal laptops to class.
The following activity was part of a three-hour class on nonverbal behaviors. Even though the example describes how this activity was used with the different types of nonverbal behaviors, it can be used with any topic that has categories or classifications. For example, it could be used for writing genres, biomes, art types, historical eras, etc.
Goals of the Activity:
- To use videos and QR codes to explore and learn about a class topic.
- To build community by working on a common project.
Needed Materials/Functions:
- One mobile device per group to create videos that can be uploaded directly to YouTube
- One mobile device per group with a QR reader. I recommend i-nigma. The same device can be used for recording video, scanning QR codes, and viewing videos on the mobile device.
- One computer per group that has internet access.
- A printer that computers are connected to.
- A YouTube Account
Procedures:
- Form students/members into smaller groups – 3 to 5 members per group.
- Ask students to create short videos using their mobile devices that demonstrate smaller concepts within a larger topic. Have students videotape 4 to 6 separate short videos (a minute or less) from the list of categories or classifications provided to them about the topic selected. In this example, for my interpersonal relations class, students were asked to create videos to demonstrate different nonverbal behaviors from the following list: glance, eye contact (gaze), volume, vocal nuance, proximity, gestures, facial expression, pause (silence), intonation, dress, posture, word choice and syntax, sounds (paralanguage) http://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/lead689/NonVerbal.html
- Encourage them to provide enough information to showcase the topic but not too much that the answer/category is too obvious.
- Ask students to upload each of their videos to YouTube. If they don’t have their own accounts, you can provide them with an email address to send their videos directly to your YouTube account. This information can be found under account settings.
Thanks, Hall Davidson for this tip.
- Have them generate QR Codes for each video they created using a service such http://goqr.me/ or YouTube Video QR Code Generator. These are generated by inserting the YouTube video URL to general the QR code.
- Print the QR codes and distribute them to each of the groups. So if there are 5 groups, print four sets for the four other groups. Develop a coding system or have groups develop a coding system that identifies their group, a unique symbol for each of the sets, and the number of the video. This permits an easy identification code of which group and which video for the next part. A coding system can include giving each group a set of numbers to identify which groups have their QR codes. Going back to the example of five groups, group one can be given 1-4, group two 5-9, group three 10-13 and so on. Groups can then be instructed to label their videos A through E (given they made five videos).
- Groups receive the QR codes for videos completed by the other groups. Ask group members view the videos via the QR codes and identify which of the concepts the video is depicting.
- For this example, the different types of nonverbal behaviors were printed and taped on the classroom wall. When a group identified which behavior, they taped their QR code under that category. Once completed, groups “graded” one another’s correct categories referring to the codes they developed and by writing a “yes” or “no” on the QR code.
- Alternative One: to posting the QR codes on the wall is to have students identify which concept by writing it directly on the printed QR codes they received. The need for groups coding their QR codes would be eliminated. Correctness of their responses would be determined during the next step when the videos are shown to the entire class.
- Alternative Two: If there is access to a computer lab/1:1 mobile lab, the QR Codes could be displayed on the monitors. There would need to be enough computers to show on the videos/QR Codes created. Videos could be accessed via these monitor displays through their mobile devices using their QR readers. Then students could write their guess down for each of the videos. The need for groups coding their QR codes would be eliminated. Correctness of their responses would be determined during the next step when the videos are shown to the entire class.
- Show the videos using a projector, interactive whiteboard. Facilitate a discussion about the concepts and how well they were depicted in the student videos.
Give it a try. Use your QR reader to access and view the following videos created by students about nonverbal behaviors. See if you can guess which behavior they depicted using the nonverbal behavior list provide above.
Mobile-Driven Identity Activities
Leveraging the students’ mobile devices has become an ongoing and integrated practice of my face-to-face undergraduate course on Interpersonal Relations. What follows are the mobile and technology driven activities completed during the class on personal-identity.
I Am Poems
Students are given the following template and asked to fill in the blanks to create their own I Am Poems.
Once the poems are written, students are provided with a link to a shared Google Doc Presentation and instructions to use one of the presentation slides to compose their poem and include a photo from their Facebook accounts or one taken with their mobile that symbolizes the essence of their identify. After all students complete this task, the presentation is projected via an interactive board. Students, one at a time, read their poems to their classmates.
We made an “I AM” poem, which I thought was very fun. It was interesting to see the imaginations on some classmates. These activities are what makes the class fun.
We wrote ” I am” poems which was really cool too. I liked seeing what everyone had to say about themselves. I got to see a side of them that I probably never would have.
Values Identification
Students are asked to choose their three top values from a list of values. They are then given the task to locate objects in their environment that symbolize these values and take photos using their mobile devices. Directions are given to email their photos to a Flickr account set up for this purpose. Students do not need to have an account on Flickr to do so. The steps to set this up are as follows:
- Set up an account on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/
- Photos can then be emailed directly to this Flickr account. “You can upload photos to Flickr from your camera using your unique email upload address. When you upload photos via email, the subject line is used as the title of your photo, and the body of the email is used as the description” (http://www.flickr.com/help/mobile/)
Students are given the email address to send their photos to Flickr along with the instructions to put the name of their value in the subject line and why they selected that value in the description. Since all the group’s images will are sent to this single Flickr account, students are able to view each other’s photographs through the Flickr website projected on a screen if in a face-to-face setting.
Going over our values was an important part of the activity (I personally can say) because our values play a critical role in our self-esteem, they dictate what is important to us.
Peer Feedback
The Johari Window is introduced to the students. The focus of this activity is on the window known to others but not known to self. Since the students have been working together for several weeks, they have some knowledge of their classroom peers. As such, they are instructed to provide feedback to those three or four students with whom they have had most contact during the initial weeks of the course. Feedback is provided in the form of three descriptive adjectives texted to the person receiving the feedback.
We sent messages to other people describing how we saw them when we first met in class. This was surprising to me because I received different feedback then I would expect..