The first and most important issue surrounding using mobile devices is to acknowledge that the kids of today expect and demand to have and communicate with mobile devices. Banning them will simply cause the devices to adapt in ways that hide them from the teacher, books or pens that are mobile communicators and someone looking couldn't tell this.
Second, using the tools the students use with each other is a another great channel to reach them through. Adding some education noise to all the communications they are getting is good way to get time in and get thinking to happen when they are away from the classroom.
Say my history class is after lunch and during lunch I message my students 3 questions they need to ask the people around them. Do you know who JFK is? When was he president? What happened to him? They now talk and converse and my class begins by asking them about what they heard, starting a discussion and leading to a presentation. At the end of my class I send out a message with links to other information they could pursue later in the day. This type of interaction is a great way to engage people with the technology they already have and use.
Another great way to interact with mobile phones during a class would be to use text messaging to reach out and gather information about the topic to be studied. You could have the kids send messages to their peers or parents asking about topics or taking a poll and collecting and using the data in class. This gets them interested and engaged in ways they aren't now with current teaching methods. If their quotes and data show up in lessons they should be more willing to pay attention and it will be more relevant to their lives.
4/16/2008
Cool school project
This a great school project displayed on youtube. It is a WW2 propaganda video made by students. This a great idea for history teachers to get students engaged in a topic. To make movie takes all kinds of skills and students working together can make for some really interesting ideas being brought out by the students themselves.
ERIC SMITH
ERIC SMITH
3/22/2008
brainwashing kids with facebook
Having only been a facebook user for a week, I already see it could be a powerful tool to use in education. The concept of social networking really applies to classroom. Once you have everyone in a class linked up as friends you can start to really develop niches for students to want to fit into.
Groups would be great way to get people with similar interests together online. Say a history group that as a teach you could seed with topics that come from class and get people involved online. Quizzes or some of the other tools could be used to spark competition by the students to get the high score.
Collaboration could really be leveraged for group projects or other kinds of things were groups of students need organizing help. They could use the tools to track assignments and divide work and as teacher you could see if they were keeping up or where they need more help.
Another key element, one I blogged before is parental involvement. If you could get the parents of you students into facebook you could get them engaged with pictures of their kids, seeing their kids content, making a connection to home life that could really help kids be interested. If as a teacher you post an activity or something for the parents to do over the weekend, the kids would come in the next week without realizing they had been schooled!
Parents could connect with other parents, and provide feedback to the teacher as to topics to cover, things their kids might be more interested in, it could really be a good way to communicate without much effort to a lot of people involved in a classroom.
There is also a lot of fun things you could do with some of the applications that could be used to link into many topics. From the environment to economics and math there are so many options it is crazy. Kids now are so computerized this will continue to be a way to break into all the noise of their life and get more focus on education.
Facebook is a fantastic tool that has many educational uses, that I hope more and more teachers will see and leverage the technology in their classrooms.
Eric Smith
Groups would be great way to get people with similar interests together online. Say a history group that as a teach you could seed with topics that come from class and get people involved online. Quizzes or some of the other tools could be used to spark competition by the students to get the high score.
Collaboration could really be leveraged for group projects or other kinds of things were groups of students need organizing help. They could use the tools to track assignments and divide work and as teacher you could see if they were keeping up or where they need more help.
Another key element, one I blogged before is parental involvement. If you could get the parents of you students into facebook you could get them engaged with pictures of their kids, seeing their kids content, making a connection to home life that could really help kids be interested. If as a teacher you post an activity or something for the parents to do over the weekend, the kids would come in the next week without realizing they had been schooled!
Parents could connect with other parents, and provide feedback to the teacher as to topics to cover, things their kids might be more interested in, it could really be a good way to communicate without much effort to a lot of people involved in a classroom.
There is also a lot of fun things you could do with some of the applications that could be used to link into many topics. From the environment to economics and math there are so many options it is crazy. Kids now are so computerized this will continue to be a way to break into all the noise of their life and get more focus on education.
Facebook is a fantastic tool that has many educational uses, that I hope more and more teachers will see and leverage the technology in their classrooms.
Eric Smith
3/16/2008
Powerpoint Software
I think the one of the most useful things about PowerPoint that most people have never heard of is PowerPoint Software.
And by software I mean simple user interactive information presentation system. Using slides to illustrate things around a concept. Having a home page with things to click on that bring you to new slides and those can have embedded video, pictures or other content to view and then return to a home page. Saving the PowerPoint as a presentation only so it is not editable and can only be used as a display for the end user.
There are many places that this could be useful in a classroom. At a classroom computer students could select the file or you could have a PowerPoint app built to help find presentations you have made and use a portal to the current information. This way you can have people exploring information without help from a teacher hopefully adding to the information you have presented.
This could also be used at home either from a web page or distributed somehow for home use. People could have the information for a time and then an in class quiz or something to ensure people have viewed it.
Some of the topics that would work really well are thing like History or Science topics where you have many different types of media to use in teaching. Documents, pictures, sound could all come together in an presentation to be explored in a more interesting way then simply clicking a web page or many files in a folder.
I think this kind of thing is a great way to get students involved in a technological way but easy to design and build applications for specific topics quickly customizable for classes as needed.
ERIC SMITH
And by software I mean simple user interactive information presentation system. Using slides to illustrate things around a concept. Having a home page with things to click on that bring you to new slides and those can have embedded video, pictures or other content to view and then return to a home page. Saving the PowerPoint as a presentation only so it is not editable and can only be used as a display for the end user.
There are many places that this could be useful in a classroom. At a classroom computer students could select the file or you could have a PowerPoint app built to help find presentations you have made and use a portal to the current information. This way you can have people exploring information without help from a teacher hopefully adding to the information you have presented.
This could also be used at home either from a web page or distributed somehow for home use. People could have the information for a time and then an in class quiz or something to ensure people have viewed it.
Some of the topics that would work really well are thing like History or Science topics where you have many different types of media to use in teaching. Documents, pictures, sound could all come together in an presentation to be explored in a more interesting way then simply clicking a web page or many files in a folder.
I think this kind of thing is a great way to get students involved in a technological way but easy to design and build applications for specific topics quickly customizable for classes as needed.
ERIC SMITH
2/19/2008
HandiCapable
I think it is too easy in this day and age to support people with different needs using technology that is now cheap and readily available.
One of the key problems is how much extra time it takes to help people detracts from the entire group effort. So technology that bridges the gap in unobtrusive ways is key. If the class can be recorded or translated say into sign language without the need for the teacher to adapt or change this opens up inclusion and equal learning in a way never available in the past. More focus on making the person with disabilities able to take on challenges themselves without need for outside resources is going to help them in the long term and not become dependent on unnecessary help.
It is also useful if the people without disabilities can also benefit from the use of technology. Say you use the text to speech converter to help someone with reading problems, you can also post the original text and the pod-cast to be available to anyone. If someone missed class or just missed something they could use this content to get caught back up.
Technology by its very nature should appear to be magic. You dont know how it works, you dont see what it is doing, it should be so simple to use it is obvious in function and simple to determine functionality. This is the opposite of current reality, but must be the goal so that the tech is most helpful to the provider(the teacher) and the user to ensure the most benefits with the least amount of effort. We should only invest in technology that fits this model or too much will be spent and not used or discarded after a few soured attempts.
It is also good there are laws like the ADA and IDEA to force this to be the case, but those only provide a basic framework and as with any government are designed to raise people up to a certain bottom. These laws should be far exceeded and compliance should go way beyond them, even if it means getting outside funding either with grant applications or other fundraising. The technology also changes way to fast for a law to keep up with and thus current tech must be purchased even it if hasn't made it on the approved list.
Eric Smith master of the universe, ruler of all that is or is not
2/04/2008
Parental Units
I think we should use blogs to inform the parents about their kids daily activities and get them involved in conversations at home. Say there is a class presentation by the kids, take pictures of each child and blog about what it was about, parents can see it on the same day it happened and maybe will ask about it at home. This also allows parental feedback and they can also see whatelse is happening in the class and maybe find other parents of classmates to bond with.
1/30/2008
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