Talkin' 'bout my cerebration.

I was recently recruited to conduct a Professional Development session for a group of teachers working within an “Academic Excellence” department at a local high school.  There was little direction provided for the session, simply wanting to have their understanding of technology expanded.  I saw this as an opportunity to implement a session on mLearning.  It also allowed me to practice a presentation I will be basing a full day training session on next year.

When I think mLearning, I think of three things – devices, cloud computing and portability.

Devices

This section’s objective was to demonstrate the functionality of a range of devices for gathering data, then transporting this data back to a central recording point for presentation.  This group of teachers were relatively inexperienced with ICTs in education, thinking of desktops and laptops as the sole items that allowed integration of technology in education.  I distributed instructions and the participants had to complete the task using the devices provided.  As an extra challenge, I had one set of instructions stored on my phone (video format) and these were distributed via bluetooth.

As expected, the progress of the task became slower and more difficult at the point when particpants needed to return their evidence to a central point.  I had established my laptop as the central point, access to which occurred through cabling, bluetooh or card reader.

One device I am really enjoying exploring the educational possibilities of is the iPod Touch.  Screenshots (showing applications installed) are here and here.  Other devices included video cameras, still cameras, voice recorders, PDAs, netbooks and mobile phones.

Cloud computing

The conference participants were aware of general internet use, and could navigate through sites if directed, so this session was more an awareness raising session on web technologies that incorporated mobile devices for functionality, and web spaces that could be used for organisation of teaching materials.  The specific sites experienced are as below;

• Netvibes – use a public page to store RSS feeds and links to relevant places.
• Diigo – host a pre conference discussion on a relevant stimulus (eg. blog post)
• Dabbleboard – collaborative whiteboard that I used as a pseudo back channel.
• Poll Everywhere – audience response system uses mobile phones.
• Slideshare – locate existing presentations an instructor could use (with attribution).

These are all services I use when developing my learning spaces.  Blackboard is the system my organisation uses as a LMS, but I find these services too functional to ignore.

Access

Specifically, portability of work.  Many of us carry around removable memory with work files on them.  I’ve installed a suite of portable applications that allow me to continue my work on any computer.  Currently the portable suite only runs on Windows, so I need to find a windows emulator that can be initiated from removable memory on either OSX or Linux.

The portable applications I use are;

• Portable Firefox
• Portable Thunderbird
• Open Office
• Evernote
• IHMC CMaps (concept mapping)
• Kompozer (web page creation)
• Scribus (desktop publisher)
• FileZilla (FTP)
• Audacity
• GIMP
• AviScreen (screen capture)
• VLC media player
• xplorer2 (file manager)
• Keepass (password manager)
• 7 zip
• Synctoy

These applications (stored on a 4GB USB drive) allow me to complete all my work functions without relying on software installed on the host computer.  I lead my students through building similar suites to allow them to be more productive within the restricted system in which we work.

In 2 hours I raced through these sections, really providing only a tast of what mLearning can achieve.  I will build on this in preparation to conduct a full day training session in 2009 for teachers within my region.  My presentations are built using concept maps lately, and the maps for this session are stored here.