Core Apps for iPad Teachers

Are you a teacher, using iPads in the classroom? Which tools, or apps do you use?
Many conversations about mobile learning focus too much on the content itself. Starting from the distance learning / e-learning / content publishing end of the spectrum, and trying to find entire chunks of the curriculum that can be delivered via small screens.
To counteract that, have a look at this great summary of "Core Teacher Apps", put together by an Australian Primary School.
They are using iPads, but many of the listed apps are web based. Or are also available for Android. And in almost all cases, the apps themselves are secondary to the use cases implied.
I suggest you print this out, and use the list as a reminder:

• new to m-learning? Look through these, and think what you might use them for in a classroom
• an m-learning veteran? Look through this list to find some inspiration. Anything you haven't tried before? Why not?

With thanks to St Oliver Plunkett Primary School

Are the robots taking over? Augment your reality, don't lose it!

When is technology helping, and when does it hinder?
How can you ensure "enthusiasm for the new" doesn't blind you to what is good right now?

I'm not sure I have any perfect answers, but I spent a very interesting hour at the trendy studios at LondonReal being interviewed by Brian and Nic, who were not educators, but wanted to understand what we are up to, and exactly how far is too far to take technology

You can catch the (visual) podcast, below, or scan down the page for a few snippets


Here is a hastily transcribed synopsis, below, to help you navigate your way through:

[6-7 mins] What's mobile learning all about?

[7.30] Thinking about touch screens. Voice control. Google glass.
- what's augmented reality all about
- where's the meaning, and sense in that, and what could you do for learning ?

[10 mins] And how soon with augmented reality be real?

[14 mins] Nic the AR cynic - "is technology swamping our humanity"?
- tech is flooding us like a wave. our choice is how to deal with it
- your mission: how to use it for good!

[16 minutes] So what should we be doing differently at school to prepare for this?
- thinking about the skills you need for future life, rather than narrow focus on a few subjects

[18:30] If you have to measure schools, maybe you should be looking 10 years down the line. How many of their graduates end up doing awesome, new jobs that weren't even invented when they were at school! That's enlightened schooling

[21 mins] Singing the praises of the MAKR / maker movement. Especially some of the cool coding tools like Rasberry Pi and Arduino.

[24:30] Nic again - "Is technology making us more stupid then?"
- all about a trade-off. Using technology to help me, but not letting it remove my humanity
- we need to learn new social skills about living with always on technology. Should you answer your phone while talking to friends?
- introducing Phone Stack - the ultimate game for phone-addicted diners!

[29:30] Ubuntu. Introducing a cool philosophy that helps keep your place in live. Your success is connected to our success, my friend!
m-Ubuntu project: Several pieces on this blog, a talk I did on it at TEDxLondon, and further info here: http://www.m-ubuntu.org.za/

[34 mins] People need people. Adding a bit of "social" into a very dispersed virtual learning environment.
- technology can help fill the gaps

[36:30] Should we all be getting cybernetic implants?
- awesome medical applications
- same story as augmented reality. It can be used for awesome good, but it is up to you to maintain your humanity!!

[39 mins] So are machines taking over? Are we becoming one with the borg?
- humans have always used tools. Technology is no different.

[43:30] Your brain is very good at tricking you. Re-writing your own personal narrative
- technology can help you understand your own narrative a little better
- you can't trust your own recollection of past events!

[46 mins] Who are the technology companies to watch?
1) the big guys, like Google, Qualcomm, HP etc (who have the weight to explore the peripheries of the mainstream)
2) the visionaries. Like Mozilla, Wikipedia, GitHub (who have a bold mission they champion)

[50:30] Has apple peaked? Has blackberry died? Who is winning the mobile mega-race?
- my thoughts? People should stop over-agonising about who is top dog. In reality it is mostly irrelevant to our lives. And often very geographically skewed

[53 mins] What about MOOCs / iTunesU? Are these important? Are they game changers?
- Are they important? Absolutely
- Are they the future? Not as they are right now, though already they are doing some meaningfully open / egalitarian things.
- the next generation of them will move from "broadcast" mode to a more empowering educational model
- Another important angle is OER (open educational resources), as well as sites that help you practice, and build skills like http://www.codeuniversity.com/

[57 mins] How did you end up with your job? Are startups a good place to start?
- You really need the underpinning technology skills, but after that, the real value is in all the other disciplines that get layered on top.
- Startups are great fun, but can be abusive for young techies. If you are joining one, make sure the startup REALLY gets technology, and lets you help shape it. And that you believe in the vision.

[101 mins] Find people who inspire you. Learn from the masters. Mine were all in the tradition of Adult Learning. Empowerment. Education to make a difference. People like Paolo Friere, Seymour Papert, Desmond Tutu as well as my personal mentors (that's you Dad, and Martin!)

Final word: Technology is GREAT for education. But use it as tools to do things, don't slip into the trap of letting it DO things for you.

If your educational technology starts feeling like a sausage machine, with pre-digested knowledge being shoved into you, you are doing it wrong. Turn and run away.

Mobile Learning at TEDxLondon

Geoff Stead presents mobile learning as a tool for empowerment at TEDxLondon – a TED event dedicated to shaking up education

Original slides available on slideshare

Presentations by the other (amazing!) co-presenters on the TEDxLondon site

Transcript:

I’d like to introduce you to a word. Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is an African concept that doesn’t translate easily into English. It means “I am me because of us”, “I grow myself by helping others around me to grow”.

It is an awesome word. I try to live my life by it. And it is the philosophy behind the projects I would like to tell you about.

Mobile phones have become part of our lives. There are more phones in the developed world than people. The developing world is catching up fast. Mobile connectivity is transforming how we communicate. And where.  And when. It has fundamentally changed how we look up information. It has generated new kinds of job that didn’t even exist 10 years ago. New types of entertainment.  New forms of art.

So why not new ways to learn?

This is already happening - it is called mobile learning. Bringing mobile devices and phones into the class to enhance learning.

Smartphones are like a swiss army knife, packed with school friendly tools:
They are cameras, writing tools, eBook readers, calculators, diaries, reference books. You have the entire web in your hand

But more importantly they are agents for change - encouraging new ways of teaching

    * Learner centered: Learning is mobile and can happen anywhere. It can happen anytime: in or out of school. It can be collaborative. It can also be intensely private.
    * Teacher is no longer the source of all facts, but rather a collaborator and guide
    * The encourage lots of future skills like those listed on the slide

In the UK I mostly work with learners NOT in school. Kids who have dropped out. Young offenders. The unemployed. Adults in training but struggling to read and write. People for whom traditional school didn’t work out. I build software to support their learning – regularly making use of mobile phones as a stimulus. But a few years ago I happened to meet a fellow South African who shared my passion for education, and wanted to take these same ideas back into South Africa, to mainstream schools

And we did! The projects are collectively called m-ubuntu, and use mobile learning as a stimulus to encourage critical debate between teachers, and improve the quality of teaching.

They take refurbished smartphones, with some educational software and tools installed onto them, and use them to improve teaching and learning. The results have been inspiring. Local teachers even won a grant from the US to go to Washington and share what they had learned with American teachers!

But the successes are not down to putting smartphones into poor schools – they are about using them as an agent for change.

The real wins happen when teachers work with other teachers to discuss how best to use these new tools.

<< stepping through a range of photos from the project >>

Of course these happy photos only tell a fragment of the story. There are some challenging new skills to learn for both students and teachers. What happens if they are stolen? Or if students give away personal data? What about internet safety? Or plagiarism. By working on these challenges together, the real value kicks in . Students get engaged and build real life skills

Mobile learning is certainly here to stay. It may be initially disruptive – but isn’t that exactly the stimulus we need to help focus education towards the future?

If you want to try this for yourself, here are my 3 top tips:

1. Firstly – don’t be constrained by pre-packaged learning resources. Think of the smartphone as a tool to do stuff. Record music. Film a movie. Build an app. This is what they are made for, and makes for the best learning.
2. Secondly – It won’t be right first time, but if you try again it will get better. And the time after than even better. It is OK to make mistakes – so plan in flexibility
3. Thirdly – Share the learning with your students. Discuss mobile learning with them. Let the kids learn the details about the phones, and become your technical support. By building autonomy and problem solving skills they will be learning some real future skills

Google’s App Inventor … liberation or stagnation?

A year ago, Google released App Inventor – a fascinatingly visual, albeit rather buggy tool for developing android apps. Although not robust enough for our commercial development, we loved the fresh ideas about interface, and app building. Perfect tools for learning about coding. Today I found an email in my inbox announcing that Google are dropping support for it.

Google are open-sourcing the code base. Often a sign of a project’s demise. Sounds like bad news for education … or is it?

mobile phones: the e-readers of choice in South Africa

Our m-Ubuntu project in South Africa hits the news in USA!

I have blogged about m-uBuntu before – a growing family of schools in South Africa who are using “cell phones” to transform how they teach.

We have been out there a few times, and were very excited to hear it being reported on by “The Word”, a US radio channel who spent a while in Cape Town visiting two great mobile literacy projects there:

• M4Lit – Mobile Phones for Literacy. Young people writing mobile stories. Championed by the excellent Steve, Ana & Marion at the University of Cape Town
• m-Ubuntu – Helping transform teaching in impoverished classrooms, and empower resource-poor teachers.

You can here the recording here: 

Well done the the m-uBuntu team! It is the perfect example of collaboration, empowerment, and shared learning.

- based in South Africa
- dreamt up and managed from Washington
- funding from Sweden, UK, USA
- feet firmly planted on South African soil
- championed by Learning Worldwide (Theo), Duke University (Lucy), Tribal (Geoff & Jess), diGameworks (Jeff) and many other friends

Even the learning itself follows the principle of “u-Buntu”, helping one another to help ourselves. This is not an initiative trying to push unwelcome solutions – rather they are helping the South African Education system rise to the challenge of supporting more students with less money.

m-learning at the White House!

Our work with m-uBuntu has suddenly gone global - two weeks ago we were sitting in a rural school in South Africa, and this week we are in Washington, DC with four of the students presenting our work!

We were picked as one of 3 projects to showcase Mobile Learning to the White House officials who spearhead technology-assisted learning initiatives in the US. 
 

By “we”, I mean Tribal (Jess) and Duke University (Lucy), masterminded by the ever energetic Theo at LearningWorldwide who turned this dream into a reality.

At the event, a Global Digital Media and Learning competition was launched in collaboration with Presidents Obama’s Educate to Innovate initiative, ‘challenging designers, inventors, entrepreneurs and researchers to create digital environments that promote building & tinkering in new innovative ways’.

Following Jess’s travelogue, it seems that the highlights were a double whammy of:

• meeting the Aneesh Chopra, first Federal Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America, and
  
• taking the students out for pizza!

See what the students themselves have to say.

This is deeply moving stuff. Children who had not even touched a mobile phone before using it to build literacy skills. And the project is working!

Go m-Ubuntu! it is a pleasure to work with you.

Make a movie on your PSP!

Have any of you PSP people found out about Go! Edit yet?

If you are using PSP's for education, you have no reason not to! It is a free to download that lets you edit video on your PSP.

Add it to the Go!Cam video camera that plugs into the top of it, and you have a seriously mobile and creative video editing tool.

You can get all the lowdown on the Go!Edit site, though a better place to start would be to download the instruction manual which has some good screen dumps.

Let us know how you get on (and thanks to our inside sources at Sony UK for the details - you know who you are!)