Mobile Learning

A Handbook for Developers, Educators, and Learners

Scott McQuiggan, Jamie McQuiggan, Jennifer Sabourin, Lucy Kosturko

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118894286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Explore the game-changing technology that allows mobile learning to effectively reach K-12 students

Mobile Learning: A Handbook for Developers, Educators and Learners provides research-based foundations for developing, evaluating, and integrating effective mobile learning pedagogy. Twenty-first century students require twenty-first century technology, and mobile devices provide new and effective ways to educate children.

But with new technologies come new challenges—therefore, this handbook presents a comprehensive look at mobile learning by synthesizing relevant theories and drawing practical conclusions for developers, educators, and students.

Mobile devices—in ways that the laptop, the personal computer, and netbook computers have not—present the opportunity to make learning more engaging, interactive, and available in both traditional classroom settings and informal learning environments. From theory to practice, Mobile Learning explores how mobile devices are different than their technological predecessors, makes the case for developers, teachers, and parents to invest in the technology, and illustrates the many ways in which it is innovative, exciting, and effective in educating K-12 students.

• Explores how mobile devices can support the needs of students
• Provides examples, screenshots, graphics, and visualizations to enhance the material presented in the book
• Provides developers with the background necessary to create the apps their audience requires
• Presents the case for mobile learning in and out of classrooms as early as preschool
• Discusses how mobile learning enables better educational opportunities for the visually impaired, students with Autism, and adult learners.

If you're a school administrator, teacher, app developer, or parent, this topical book provides a theoretical, well-researched discussion of the pedagogical theory and mobile learning, as well as practical advice in setting up a mobile learning strategy.

Chapter 1
Changing Education with Mobile Learning

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In our ever-changing marketplace, today's students are being educated, largely, for jobs that haven't yet been invented. Technology is being created and updated at a frenetic pace, and growing more pervasive and useful with each stride. As schools face dwindling resources and higher stakes than ever, does mobile technology hold the key to improving the educational system and reengaging students? Mobile technology offers a plethora of features and benefits that enable it to break the educational system wide open, engaging students in new ways and making educational experiences more meaningful, if schools can effectively utilize structured, integrated approaches for implementation of this new technology.

This interest in smartphones, tablets, and laptops is a major opportunity to present new and exciting educational experiences. To what extent are schools capitalizing on this, though? And how often are they getting in their own way in reaching students? One teacher notes with frustration that her school has several iPad carts that teachers are encouraged to use, but cellphones are banned categorically. “There are certain times we might be doing a lesson and someone asks a question and I think ‘This'd be a great time to all get out our devices and look something up,’ but we can't use cellphones and have to reserve our iPad carts in advance, so the moment passes. It's frustrating because almost all of the kids have phones and their parents are paying for data plans anyway, but we can't use them.”¹ In effect, schools with policies like these end up ignoring the technology and the skillset necessary to effectively use it in learning and life, leaving students not fully prepared for the real world.

In another school, eighth-grade teachers have access to iPads the school has purchased and encourages them to use in their classrooms. Teachers are excited to have the devices, but don't really know what to use them for, and they often sit unused. When asked what she uses them for, one teacher suggested they can be used as calculators. Clearly handing a device to a teacher with no guidance or training is not a way to make the best use of this expensive, Internet-connected device.

Stories like these, of school policy being dictated to teachers and ineffective mobile technology use, are, sadly, not difficult to find. Policies that categorically ban certain devices that are used in everyday life are lazy, failing to see the possibilities that they have to change and improve pedagogy. However, schools realize boundaries and acceptable uses of mobile technology need to be clearly defined, but they may not know where to begin. Rather than reimagining education and figuring out how to integrate modern technology to effectively reach students, administrators too often ignore and put up walls against new technologies. We present these stories not to discourage or say that there are simply too many hurdles and poor implementations of mobile technology. We offer these examples to illustrate the widespread misunderstandings about mobile learning and our need to address some key challenges.

Ignoring mobile learning because of potential distraction or misuse results in missed opportunities for teaching tomorrow's citizens how to find and use a seemingly limitless source of information at their fingertips. Mobile technology offers a huge opportunity to revolutionize education and learning, if knowledgeable, creative, and open-minded teachers and administrators embrace it.

A Brief History of Educational Technology: What Will Revolutionize the System?

A new classroom tool promises to improve student learning and enable a more enriching learning experience. In a video promoting this tool, a student is seen answering questions in class at his own pace, and receiving immediate feedback to know if he was wrong or right. An expert notes some benefits of this tool: “There is also a motivating effect. The student is free of uncertainty or anxiety about his success or failure. His work is pleasurable. He does not have to force himself to study…it generates a high level of interest and enthusiasm.” This expert notes that technology could enable students to cover more than two times the information when compared to traditional classroom techniques.

B.F. Skinner gave this forecast on the potential for technology to revolutionize learning and classroom procedures in 1954.² His teaching machine sounds strikingly similar to predictions today on how mobile technology can revolutionize classroom learning for students, though these were based on Skinner's teaching machine, a clunky early computing machine that offered students a new way to learn independently using targeted, self-paced lessons. Similar predictions have since been made about personal computers, netbooks, and other technologies. So, the question is, why were those predictions wrong in 1954, and subsequently, and why are they different with mobile learning?

While mobile technology offers a distinct difference from other technology, technology itself is hardly a stranger to the educational setting. Computers have been in the classroom and have been promising to revolutionize education for decades, though they haven't changed education much. It's fair to say that while Skinner's teaching machine was novel, it didn't do as much as he imagined it would to shake up the traditional and inefficient classroom structure.

Over the past half century, as computers developed and became smaller, more efficient, and easier to use, they increasingly found their way into the classroom. This technology has changed the experience in schools, as well, as noted in Figure 1.1. Computers have been in schools since the 1960s: first to store student data and eventually, for student use. This changed in the early 1980s with the Apple II. Before the Apple II, large mainframe computers had some presence in schools, though they were not very widespread.³ The first affordable and widely adopted personal computer was the Apple II, which also happened to be a watershed moment for personal computer technology. It offered a computer for everyone, not just the hobbyists and folks who wanted a computer to tinker with. The Apple II was ready to run for anyone, and it was widely adopted by educational markets (which were also heavily marketed to⁴). By the mid-1980s, the Apple II was the predominant computer in K–12 settings.⁵ In the 1980s, much of the curriculum surrounding computers in the classroom related to teaching how computers worked (programming languages, for instance) or for games (i.e., Oregon Trail) and less on using them to perform other nontechnical educational functions.

Figure 1.1 Educational Technology Over Time

By 1990, most classrooms across the United States had access to computers in some way, and their use in augmenting and supporting classroom instruction grew as the 1990s went on. These systems provided a self-paced learning experience for each user; however each learning experience followed a set trajectory that offered the same help, the same questions and answers, and the same path. In short, there was no customization to the learning, only an individualized pacing. There was often instant feedback, so it did offer many benefits to old systems, though the true potential for an intelligent learning system was not reached.⁶ Computers used CD-ROM disks, and with the growth and release of new Microsoft products throughout the 1990s (Windows 95, Windows 98, most notably) and the maturation of the software and hardware industries, computers became commonplace in the classroom.⁷ Technological initiatives at the time focused on connecting classrooms to the still very new Internet. As the World Wide Web grew to show its use in homes and offices across America, government initiatives channeled funds to get classrooms wired and students online, as well as to give students technological literacy skills.⁸

Desktop computers, laptops, and netbooks were the most prevalent technologies utilized by schools until early 2010 when Apple released the iPad, which created a new category for mobile devices: the tablet computer. Featuring touchscreen technology, increased portability, Wi-Fi, and an intuitive user interface, the iPad presented a major game-changer for digital learning. Soon after, competing tablets emerged on the Android operating system. Slowly, the tablet stole market share from netbooks, and in early 2013, Acer and Asus, the top two netbook producers, officially phased out production of their netbooks, effectively ending the netbook market.⁹

Computers, and subsequently tablets, began as novelties and eventually went on to create entire markets and ways of functioning that are hard to imagine living without. Have they changed education in the same, fundamental way? Are they being used to enhance instruction and change the way we learn for the better, or are they just another tool in the same old pedagogy? Looking at the past 60 years of computer technology...