How my students are using mobile learning in and out of the classroom

devices both inside and outside the classroom. My reasoning is that there are plenty of blogs, presentations and webinars on how you could use mobile learning with students, but very few reports or accounts of how people actually do use them. Probably something to do with the challenges of introducing mobile learning in the class - the diversity of devices, the financial restrictions, the institutional resistance to them, not to mention teachers themselves and their own lack of certainty about how they can be used. Despite endless reports about how mobile learning is the big, coming thing, I think what is lacking sometimes are actual descriptions of what teachers are doing with mobile devices with their students.

To that end, I wanted to give you one of my periodic updates about how we - me and my students - are using them. So, here we go:

Posterous

As I outlined in a previous post, I’ve been encouraging students to post pictures directly from their mobile phones to our class blog (which you can see here). This has proven a rich source of discussion on a Monday morning as we review what kinds of things they’ve been up to over the weekends.

Using their mobile phones as dictaphones

This is probably our most consistent use of mobile phones both in and out of the classroom. I work a lot on speaking and pronunciation with my students, particularly preparation for the speaking section of exams such as IELTS. In class, I often get students to record themselves speaking either in pairs or groups and then get them to listen back, comment etc.

Outside the classroom, I also get them to both record themselves and other people to help with their language development. For example, the other day I started a new group and on our class website I got them to create a page of photographs AND an audio recording of themselves so they could introduce themselves to the class. It was a great way for them to get to know each other, but also really useful for me as I had a permanent recording of their speech as a baseline for their general speaking ability and as a way for planning future lessons on areas of pronunciation they have problems with.

As a reference and research tool

I do quite a lot of dictionary work with my ESL students, getting them to explore words and find out their meaning, usage, grammatical structure, collocations and example sentences. We do have class sets of paper dictionaries to use, but they can only give a partial picture of a word’s usage. It’s great if they could also have access to corpus data, such as the British National Corpus, where they can find lots of example sentences of the word in use. During class, I now encourage them to use  the school’s wifi  to access various collocation and concordance sites on their smartphones and add to their knowledge of words. Again, this is much more preferable than dragging them off to the computer room to spend a short amount of time accessing this information.

With some of my smaller classes I’ve also been handing round my Ipad so they can quickly look up data on these sites. I was a bit reluctant at first because...well, it’s my own device and I’m worried they might break it, but in fact they’ve been very gentle with it! The ease with which they have picked up how to use it - despite most of them never having used one before - and the ease with which they can share and look at the information on the device has given me a real glimpse into how these things could be used in the future. With a class set of tablets (or even just enough for one between a group) the opportunities for impromptu checking of vocabulary, looking up collocations and concordances, editing and contributing to class blogs/sites seem endless. And everything can take place in the classroom and there’s no need to go off to the computer room to do it. It feels so much more organic this way.

As an aside, our school is looking into getting a class set of tablets as a testing ground to see how they could be used in class. These won’t be Ipads - way too expensive to buy 12/13 of these for an experiment - but we plan to get some cheaper Android tablets and hopefully I’ll have a chance to use them with my students and get some feedback from them on the experience. Really looking forward to that.