Designing Mobile Communication Tools
This article changed the way I think about online courses, because there are so many factors that influence student motivation in this kind of course. I guess I took for granted all of the tools that we are introduced to and use in order to keep the course interesting and relevant. I appreciated how the author broke up the study into sections that described the components that influence student’s motivation, and then went a step further and listed and explained the tools that correlate to each motivating factor.
I was surprised to learn that Moodle, which we are all familiar with, was the e-Learning program illustrated in this study. I did have a few questions and thing I was confused about when I was reading. I am not sure what an RSS Feed is, and felt that the article did not explain and illustrate this well at all. I did do some research online, but am still a little unclear about what this is and if I have ever used it. I was also wondering is we at Adelphi only use the e-Learning platform for moodle, or do was have the capability to include mobile aspects of moodle like texting. I have never connected moodle to SMS, and am not sure how to do that. It seems like if texting was a part of online courses, it would be one of the most useful forms of communications, according to the study results. Does anyone have any answers to these questions? Thank you!
Use of Technology for Teacher Training By Jocelyn Wishart
It was easy for me to put myself in the shoes of the participants of this study because they, like me, are educators who are also students. I have never owned a PC personal digital assistant, but I can imagine it being similar to my iPhone and iPad. I found it amusing that the teachers used this technology given to them for personal use, and not for the intended use of improving their teaching practices. This is the same worry we have when providing students with technology- that they will not use it in the manner we are intending them to (teachers and students are the same in this sense). I also think that some of the teachers may not have used the PDAs because it was not a part of their normal daily routine, and it is difficult to alter one’s normal teaching/ learning habits in this way.
I also think that the teachers were reluctant to reflect of their teaching via blog posts because this is not an authentic form of learning. I know that after every lesson I teach, my first instinct isn’t to go write a blog post about how I felt the lesson went and how I would change it. I do think it is important to reflect on one’s own teaching practices, either by thinking about it or jotting down some notes in a note book (whatever works for you). However, by being required to reflect online on a blog, this does take out the authenticity of reflection and learning if that is not how a teacher would normally choose to reflect in real life. I do think that if there was a study done where it was observed how teachers use their own devices like iPhone and iPads to improve their teaching and learning practices, the results would be a little bit more positive than this particular study with PDAs.
Ipod in Education: The Potential for Teaching and Learning by Shelley Pasnik
I can tell that this article is a few years old, since I feel like the use of iPods has faded out somewhat- at least as a means of accessing information. Now we have more on to iPhones and iPads as the mainstream source of technology for personal use and in the classroom as well. I guess that iPods would be more reasonably prices compared to iPhone and tablets, and are also smaller than tablets, which can be seen as an advantage. Personally, my iPod is buried in a drawer and I haven’t used it in at least a year. I store all of my music on my iPhone and that was the only reason I even owned an iPod (was for music storage).
One aspect of this article I would like to discuss is the idea that students “must ‘learn how to learn” (Pasnik, 6). Independent learning should not be a skill that teachers assume students possess. Instead, students should have opportunities to mess around and play with the technology in order to use it as an independent learning tool. Also, Pasnik stresses that learning must be reinforced outside of the classroom, and technology like iPods and iPhones make this even more possible. Students must be given more control over their learning, and teachers should not be controlling all decisions and aspects of student learning (as we have seen in many of the other readings this semeseter).
