This recent video (see below) considers 20 ways to use an iPod (and other mobile devices) in education. It’s interesting to consider new technologies like this and where they currently fit into the ‘Hype Cycle’. Will iPods (with associated applications) and other mobile devices follow technologies such as blogs and become well accepted amongst the education community as potentially powerful learning technologies (depending on how they’re used, of course)? If this does happen, will schools opt for cheaper ‘class sets’ of iPods rather than purchasing more expensive laptops or less flexible desktop arrangements?
More importantly, it’s interesting to analyse videos like this one and explore how many uses might approach Hedberg’s (2006) ‘generativity’ level of ICT use (see Table 1 on p5) ie. use of ICTs to encourage “learners to construct their understanding of phenomena” (p5) as distinct from presentational and representational uses of learning technologies. A couple of uses approaching this level were flagged in the Youtube clip (see below), although there were many others that seemed to replicate traditional instructionist approaches. One interesting example shown was the use of a mobile device to capture, view and review video footage (eg. of your own teaching).
I recently attended a presentation from French teacher, Bernard Garcin. He has been running a collaborative project with 30 schools around the world. They use online technologies to support their students’ language learning. They started with email but have slowly graduated to more sophisticated web-based tools. The students are given projects to do, covering a range of themes. For example, two groups were asked to compare and contrast their countries’ energy consumption levels; another group was asked to describe a tour around their home city. All students must write in a foreign language in their correspondence (ie. they are not allowed to use their native language!) One interesting technique he talked about was the use of ‘online pools / surveys’ to initiate interest and spark debate amongst students. On a practical level, Bernard said that because of time zones, theyneed a min. of 4 schools to make the projects work and approx. 10 was an ideal number of participant schools.
Footnote: A number of similar collaborative projects with a creative and language arts theme can be found here.
Made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Available here.
Prompted by a YouTube video, Shirley posts her thoughts on collaborative projects – a great focus for her work this week! Wikispaces OR a classs blog is a great way for kids in ’sister schools’ to share these kind of products, utilising the ‘comments’ feature for other kids to converse and critique (otherwise, try the new Apple Student Gallery).
Anothere exciting possibility is the collaborative (online) creation of artefacts such as video projects. For example, Jumpcut (yes, it’s free!) allows people to collaborativly build a video together, despite being in different parts of the world. A child-friendly version of such a facility will add an extra dimension to these types of collaborative projects.
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