MobileActive.org

A New Zealand Ministry of Education eFellowship report on the use of mobile phones in classrooms to foster information literacy skills.

The report considers the impact ‘anytime’ access to information via access to the mobile internet will have on teaching and learning in the future. It explores the potential applications for mobile phones in the classroom and the skills that students will need in order to cope with the mass of information on-demand that is available to them.

The research conducted for the purpose of this report involved a class set of 30 3G mobile phones being made available for a single unit of work by three different classes; a Year 12 Media Studies, Year 9 Social Studies and a general Year 8 class. Each unit of work ran for approximately 5-7 weeks. The teachers involved in the study were given support to learn how to use various functions of the mobile phones and to plan their unit of work.

The findings of this report indicate the following:

• Applications and tools available for use via a mobile phone, including access to the world wide web, have a great deal of potential for use in schools.
• Currently cost of data is the single biggest factor in limiting this use.
• While as teachers we are constantly being told our students are ‘digital natives’, many of our students are not as au fait with technology as teachers are led to believe. Students are being labelled the ‘net-gen’ and teachers who have been told that they are ‘digital immigrants’ often do not see that the skills they believe their students to have are not always present. While students may seem very ‘tech savvy’ they still need to be taught the skills to deal with the world that their use of technology gives them access to, namely the world wide web and information overload.
• Key factors identified by secondary school teachers as impacting their ability to teach information literacy included limited access to resources (particularly technologies for accessing the world wide web), access to professional development and the impact of timetabling leading to a highly segmented curriculum.

This paper set out to answer how schools and educators might consider using mobile phones to support effective teaching and learning opportunities by reviewing literature which explores both the negative and positive impacts of mobile phone use in the classroom.

The key findings point to a lack of informed decision making by schools on mobile phone policy. Findings suggest a wide variety of opportunities for enhancing classroom learning through the flexibility of time and place in which learning can occur and the ability to offer context based learning opportunities. The use of mobile phones have been found to be effective in building relationships particularly with more non-traditional or disengaged students. Negative aspects of mobile phone use by students include socially unacceptable behaviour, such as the serious nature of ‘txt-bullying’ as well as being a classroom distraction and having impacts on lowering literacy rates.

Mobile phone use in classrooms may still be largely the focus of research reports rather than mainstream adoption by schools yet if teachers are open-minded and begin to explore the technology that so many of their students are already bring in to the classroom there is huge potential for enabling a variety of effective learning strategies.

The launch of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning is one of several indicators that mobile learning globally is reaching a critical and sustainable momentum and identity. The past six or seven years have seen a host of pilots and initiatives across sectors and across countries and these have established firstly that mobile learning takes learning to individuals, communities and countries where access to learning was challenging or problematic and secondly that mobile learning enhances, enriches and extends how learning is understood. Environmental factors have meant that this development has been haphazard.

The mobile learning community is now faced with broader challenges of scale, durability, equity, embedding and blending in addition to the earlier and more specific challenges of pedagogy and technology, but these developments take place in the context of societies where mobile devices, systems and technologies have a far wider impact than just mobile learning as it is currently conceived. This paper looks at the definition and evolution of mobile learning as the starting point for a discussion of this wider impact.