Reasons why Your Cell Phone is Revolutionizing Education
1. Shifting Paradigms At one time, a formal education was confined to four classroom walls. Mobile devices have allowed for a full transformation of how we perceive “education.” We’ve entered a new age of connected learners, continuous learners, expecting immediate and infinite information related to any subject. These learners can do anything from watch an instructional YouTube clip to take an engineering course at Stanford. MOOCs, or massive online open courses, have gained popularity as of late with the inception and rapid growth of initiatives like Stanford’s Coursera, Harvard and MIT’s EdX, Udacity, and the like. Worth noting is that Stanford’s online course on virtual and artificial intelligence attracted 160,000 students. As we detail in our blog post “Making Sense of MOOCs,” anyone with an internet connection can participate in a MOOC, and most courses are free, with the exception of those that count toward school credits. That means there are no applications or tuition fees. In other words, there is no student debt. Yet this also means there’s a wealth of participants able to engage in networked learning. MOOCs are open, because they are participatory, supporting the theory of connectivism. It’s not simply a lecture or a course; MOOCs support lifelong learning because participants are expected to connect with one another, sharing their work, their learning, and their different points of view. At the end of the course, you take with you a “learning network.” This is very different educational structure than what we’re used to, yet this structure is considered eLearning. mLearning is bigger, though eLearning can take place on mobile devices. However, the shifting paradigms of eLearning broke down barriers and walls that allow mLearning to play a larger role.
2. On-demand Information Last month, we had Jackie Gerstein presenting during the webinar on student-centric education. She has implemented a flipped classroom model in her higher education courses, due to the revisited role of the educator in the mLearning era. Teachers become resource providers, guides, and tutors, as they are no longer the “gateways to knowledge.” Now, students can simply consult the devices in the palms of their hands for information. Resources like Khan Academy, webinars, youtube, blogs, tumblr, and the like, exist and serve as educational content providers, while educators provide various pedagogical methods for structure and guidance to ensure comprehension, retention, and a connection with the material.
3. Equitable Access Within the United States, the 2012 Horizon Report reveals that 61 percent of Americans 12 and older own a mobile device; 44 percent specifically own a smartphone. This has lead to the implementation of a BYOD (bring your own device) policy in many schools throughout the country. The Horizon Report specifically notes the BYOD policies of Forsyth County Schools, lead by former EdTech webinar presenter Tim Clark. This reflects an increasing acceptance of mobile devices as learning tools. What’s more, cellphones and smartphones are no longer limited to the first-world market. An NBC article reports that in 2015, the Android phone may account for 80 percent of the developing markets, including countries such as Africa, India, and China. This has huge implications both outside and inside the classroom. Education becomes accessible for anyone owning a device, regardless of socioeconomic status, gender, or physical barriers. In the classroom, educators can leverage the devices to create an active, student-centric learning environment for everyone.
4. Technological Advances and Enablers Rick Oller, from Marlboro College Graduate School, points out that advances in mobile technology and saturation of mobile usage will drive future trends. Among other things, -Mobile networks are currently accessible to upwards of 90 percent of the world’s population -There are currently 5.3 billion mobile subscribers in the world’s population -Wireless communication networks are moving to broadband capabilities with 3G and now 4G protocols coming online Oller notes, “With a critical mass of network capabilities, device hardware and software power and versatility, and global membership, mobile learning is poised to alter the educational ecosystem in many ways.”
5. Learning through collaboration Cellphones also provide an opportunity to increase student-teacher interactivity. Teachers who have been leveraging mobile devices in the classroom have helped kick the stigma associated with cellphones in class. The ubiquity of cellphones allows teachers to engage with any student in the class, regardless of class size. Top Hat Monocle allows educators to see real time feedback and learning analytic based on student submissions to quizzes, discussions, or polling transmitted through SMS devices. In fact, the use of mobile devices disrupts the traditional lecture structure. Top Hat Monocle additionally gives students a stronger voice. Teachers are now able to learn from their students, a very powerful function of a simple and increasingly common device. Students can use mobile devices to engage in collaboration using social media or related tools. TeachHub provides 50 ways to use Twitter in the classroom. One interesting idea was to create a hash-tag surrounding the topic you are covering to track it, collaborate with others globally, and integrate a lesson on how trends spread and various was in which people use social media to communicate ideas.
6. Active learning Student collaboration and increased student-teacher activity are both examples of ways to create an active learning environment in your classroom supported by mobile devices. Michael Sailor, author of The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. (Perseus Books/Vanguard Press.) says that “The best learning is active, and there’s a wealth of evidence indicating that active learning gets students more interested and boosts recall… A 2010 study in Nature Neuroscience found that we learn better when we have more control over the material, and concluded that memory is an “active profess that is intrinsically linked to behavior ‘When two or more students work together, combining their skills, it’s known as collaborative learning, a highly active process that has proved to increase exam scores from the fiftieth to the seventieth percentile, and cut the dropout rate in technical fields by 22 percent.” These are powerful statistics that could influence educators to use mobile devices in the classroom, and many colleges already have gone “all in” on mobile. Online Colleges.net details several case studies in the Webinar, so remember to join us on November 14th by registering now.
Courtesy of Rjacquez.com
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