Effective Mobile Tech: Education
One of the reasons why I first got a PDA was to help me while in college. While it was that I knew the work, I was terribly unorganized and my GPA and attitude suffered. In August of 2000, I purchased my first PDA, a Palm IIIxe, and proceeded to use PDAs not just for enhancing my own education, but using it as a tool to teach others how accessible the world is (literally in the palm of your hand) and what their dreams can really reach out towards. For those times, PDAs have really been effective as not just tools, but also entry points. And its that effectiveness that encourages me to believe that education is one area where mobile tech can really serve the greater community.
There are two aspects of PDAs that show their effectiveness: software and implementation. A program that I was recently emailed about seeks to be the software key to helping educators meet the needs of students in a computing and interactive manner. Leading Step's Constructor is a PalmOS grammar teaching game that helps students to get a better hold of various aspects of the English language. And while it is that here in the US, Constructor has been put to some great use; it is also a program that can lend itself well to English camps overseas.
...The emerging influence of mobile technologies in the classroom offers opportunities to stimulate young minds and engage students at a cost-per-student that is much lower than traditional desktop or laptop computers. At the same time, teachers are afforded a more efficient means of doing their jobs. The basic functions of handhelds have been useful for entering text in the Memo Pad, learning time and time zones, staying organized, etc., but to increase their capability as a powerful teaching tool they need to be equipped with software programs specifically designed for enhancing a student’s education...
From one of Lending Step's case studies.
It is in the second aspect of using a PDA (implementation) where one really sees this shine. Through the aforementioned case study, and countless others, when mobile devices are used in concert with an educational paradigm/system that is less "by the book" and more "by the person," one can really maximize the mobile platform as the aspect of computing that is truly personal.
For more information about Constructor and other educational PDA software, visit Lending Step's website.
There are two aspects of PDAs that show their effectiveness: software and implementation. A program that I was recently emailed about seeks to be the software key to helping educators meet the needs of students in a computing and interactive manner. Leading Step's Constructor is a PalmOS grammar teaching game that helps students to get a better hold of various aspects of the English language. And while it is that here in the US, Constructor has been put to some great use; it is also a program that can lend itself well to English camps overseas.
...The emerging influence of mobile technologies in the classroom offers opportunities to stimulate young minds and engage students at a cost-per-student that is much lower than traditional desktop or laptop computers. At the same time, teachers are afforded a more efficient means of doing their jobs. The basic functions of handhelds have been useful for entering text in the Memo Pad, learning time and time zones, staying organized, etc., but to increase their capability as a powerful teaching tool they need to be equipped with software programs specifically designed for enhancing a student’s education...
From one of Lending Step's case studies.
It is in the second aspect of using a PDA (implementation) where one really sees this shine. Through the aforementioned case study, and countless others, when mobile devices are used in concert with an educational paradigm/system that is less "by the book" and more "by the person," one can really maximize the mobile platform as the aspect of computing that is truly personal.
For more information about Constructor and other educational PDA software, visit Lending Step's website.
posted by Antoine @ 11/08/2006 09:50:00 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I was talking with a lady today at Demetri's wedding and she spoke about how she wants to integrate technology more into her English classroom in order to make learning more interactive and capture the attention of her students. Programs like this would help in those endeavors, and at the same time, teachers/instructors should understand that there is additional prep time that has to go into using the tech, making the lessons, and then accounting for the inevitable students that will not like it or who will fall behind if it is counted on too much. While there is a great need to diversify education, there is an even greater need to make sure that we are doing so without expending even more the already few resources that education seems to be getting.
Post a Comment
<< Home