After listening to Liz Kolb's session on Mobile Learning I feel like I have a better understanding of how cell phones can be used to engage students in learning and help them take control of their learning. Liz offered so many great mobile tools for learning in the classroom; I will only talk about a few. Visit Liz Kolb's blog for more information on mobile learning.
The first tools that I plan to use in my classroom are Remind101 and Celly. I love that with Remind101 you can keep students and parents updated on classroom activities. I think Remind101 will be useful because you can remind students and their parents about upcoming projects and field trips ex: 'Field Trip Update: Remember to bring an extra pair of socks for our snow shoeing trip tomorrow, in case your feet get wet! It's going to be a cold day, so dress warm!'. I like that this tool is available for free and that even if students don't have cell phones parents can serve as a reminding agent for their children.
I would like to use Celly in my classroom to have study groups or question periods during the week when school hours are over. I think that this tool would be amazing for students to have access to each other and for question times as well as my self, kind of like hosting Twitter office hours. I also think this would be interesting to use as a question 'area' during class times where students could ask their questions and we would address them with the whole class. The sad thing about Celly is that their SMS service is unavailable in Canada so hopefully this service will become available before I have my own classroom.
I would also like to use ipadio in my classroom. ipadio is a tool that allows you to make podcasts right from your phone. If you are an iPhone or Android user, there is even an app for you. The great thing about ipadio is that you can embed your podcasts right into your blog. I would like to make podcasts explaining what an assignment involves and post it on my classroom website so that if students aren't able to remember something about an assignment or they missed a day of class they can go online and have a listen for themselves.
Well I have two more mobile learning tools that I would like to talk about. The first is QR Codes and the second is polltogo. I would like to use QR codes in my classroom if I was teaching middle years or high school to lead students to additional resource tools to assist them with research for projects or to direct them to the class blog at the beginning of the year.
So I've come to the last tool I will talk about for today and that is polltogo. I like polltogo because it is a tool that I can use to see how effective my lessons are and how my students are connecting with classroom materials. I also think this would be an interesting tool to see what kinds of activities students would like to do, this tool will allow me to offer my students an opportunity to provide me with their opinion while providing them some privacy as well.
I seriously recommend checking out Liz's blog because she has so many great ideas on how to incorporate technology and specifically mobiles into the classroom.
Until next time!