I've grouped my recommended apps by function to flow a little better. I will point out that I am an Android user, but I figured I should get a good mix from both there and Apple.
Organizing
Though not directly designed for educational purposes, many
apps have great functionality for students
A great tool for organizing, well, everything. Create a notebook for a project and save
every image, link, video, whatever you want associated with that project. Create another for the resources you used and
have everything ready to make your bibliography.
Expressing Ideas
From this week's Bloom's Taxonomy of Apps link I found this
neat little app. There were a lot of different
apps that involved brainstorming and mind-mapping. I liked this because it is clear and looks
simple to use.
Similar to Idea Sketch, MindMash is used for brainstorming
and note-taking, but this one adds in the ability to insert pictures and
drawings. This takes the program beyond
what one can do on a piece of paper and into some of the truly different abilities
that digital brainstorming can bring to the table.
I like the idea of using a student’s mobile device as a
personal whiteboard, as that allows them the most freedom in their
creations. Being able to record voice
data and upload these with the drawings online opens up a lot of room for this
program as a presentation tool as well.
Classroom Tools
One type of app we can find a lot of are the ones that mimic
the functionality of classical classroom tools.
These can range from calculators to flashcards, and all take advantage
of the inexpensiveness and portability of app programs.
The gamification of education has truly begun. This is a free program that helps you learn
different languages, and even better, compete against friends at it!
This app, for Android devices, allows users to create sets of
flashcards to study or download sets others have created. One thing I noticed is that it allows you to
custom-rate the difficulty of particular cards in the set, which will change
the frequency you see those cards (the easier, the less frequent).
There are a lot of different graphing calculator apps. With the most recent version's larger
keyboard size, Mathway seems to be among the more popular.
My Own Content
As a physics teacher, one of the areas I am most interested
in is the usage of these new technologies in the science classroom. For that purpose, there are a number of apps
that can enrich science in all sorts of ways.
This is one I've been messing around with this summer. Since mobile devices have accelerometers
embedded in them to track screen orientation and other things, this makes them
excellent tools for all sorts of science experiments. These two apps (Accelogger for Android and
Accelerometer Data for Iphones, etc) record the movements of the phone / device
and can transfer that data to a computer.
With the right components, the programs will even graph that data. I've already got a lab designed for this and
there are many more I could do.
This is Google's own SkyMap, which lets you basically point
your phone at the sky and figure out what is there at any time of the day. It also lets you search for different
celestial objects, and even jump around in time to figure out what will be
where when. Get this on a student's
phone, and they will play with it. In
the classroom it may not have as much of a direct effect, but as for getting
kids minds on science, this is a tool for the proliferation of interest in
science. Note: I may be slightly biased,
as I spend way more time than I should using this app myself.
Do you recall those accelerometers I mentioned earlier? They're good; they're really good. There are a number of different heart rate
monitors for both Apple and Android devices (linked one is for Android). There are a number of different physics
things I can do with this (we do labs involving human body power and work), but
its use in Biology, Health, and even Physical Education classes should be
clear.
My thoughts
Myself, I haven't used my own mobile device for many
educational exploits (barring my explorations of the accelerometer and SkyMap
apps as mentioned earlier). Other
teachers I have interacted with seem to be even farther behind the times than I
in these regards, in that I've never heard any at my own school mention mobile
learning in any way.
Mobile learning
seems like an incredible tool for making students masters of their own
educations, since they are no longer limited by the classroom. One barrier that I see to mobile learning is
getting administrators to feel comfortable with the use of mobile devices in
the classroom. To make sure students
keep to using the devices in appropriate ways, be encouraging of the usage for
those ways. Giving students reasonable
boundaries that allow the use of cell phones, tablets, and other such devices
is something that most will recognize as fair, as long as the tools aren’t
banned outright. I would certainly
advocate using mobile learning as a part of a classroom due to simply how
powerful a tool these devices are. With
current bans on student cell phone use, students are missing out on an amazing
opportunity to become active in their own learning.
