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| Zambian delegation in InnoOmnia, Espoo, Finland. |
Mobile technology and social media have brought some freedom from sitting at the desk, accessing information assembled elsewhere. They help us to take our personal networks with us, to learn and to show things in a variety of ways, to collaborate and co-create.
In educational contexts, the devices and networks are only a part of the solution.
With the help of new pedagogy and learning design that aims to take full advantage of the mobile, crowdsourcing-capable tools, it is possible to make radical changes in the learning process: from teacher talk to learner-centric process, from desks and classrooms to task-based environments in and out of the school premises, from rigid assignment formulations to flexible activities which in carry in themselves the signs of the competence that the students have learned.
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| mobiilioppija.wikispaces.com |
Business and administration TVET students were to show their understanding of the school library service. They made a comic series out of it. Primary school kids made an eBook about The Mediterranean, enlivening it with photos from wikipedia and pics they had taken themselves on vacations. Special educational needs students in a high school have taken photos in a museum with their own phones, and continued to work on these later at school.
There are a million pedagogically sound ways of gaining from mobile learning. Another million of bringing own devices to learning.
Enter BYOD, or own devices
BYOD, or bring your own devices, means that the learner can have his or her own, familiar gadget at hand. It is up to the teacher to instruct the learning process so that it is not device- or platform-dependent.
An own device means familiar OS interface and organization, the apps that person has found best for him or herself, own materials ready at hand as connection to own cloud service accounts is a snap, and continuous presence in the virtual social networks he/she is connected.
Usually this means that instead of instructing to use certain applications or precise step-by-step procedures, teacher uses more generalized guidance, like: take pictures or shoot a short mobile video and upload that on the net, or outline your group's take on the issue with some collaborative online tool and be ready to describe the sharing of the work.
In our experience, the peer learning is a fast way to get all group members to know the application or platform chosen.
A 21st century competent teacher can not only handle a scenario like this, but also facilitate learning that takes advantage of new, personal mobile technology. He doesn't have to be a technical support but he has to facilitate the students to find missing information whenever they get stuck or are about to follow false track.
Surely BYOD method has its challenges, too, like the abundance of different devices and applications, and time spent on chatting anything but learning. It is a mixture of straight leadership and adjusting flexibility that the teacher has to possess.
Two takes on the organizational point of view
From an organizational point of view there are at least two issues on the table: professional development programmes and the cost of ICT.
Teacher training as a course-based activity is more or less fading or diminishing. Teachers are saturated with different software/platform/device trainings and are not very keen on going to dedicated courses on free time or arranging substitutes during lessons they are to skip due to their own course. More and more professional development must be woven into the daily work. Facilitating the actual work of a teacher, peer mentoring and assistance from students have proven valuable.
ICT costs have sky rocketed. BYOD might be one answer to the call to reduce those costs. If students feel it's better to use their own devices, the school doesn't have to provide so many devices, arrange so much technical support, and perhaps not to have so many it systems and services of their own. Less computers, less dedicated IT classrooms, and also less ordinary classrooms (with more versatile learning arrangements) means cost savings in these areas.
The role of ICT has expanded very rapidly, and it is not possible to meet the expectations of the information society without spending resources to educational technology.
BYOD can be seen as a way of keeping the expanding costs at the bay; new pedagogical thinking can be seen as a way of making the use of new technology effective – and not only for the course results, but for the life long learning path of the learner as well.
So, when introducing BYOD for learning, it might be useful to pay attention to AYLD too, or
Adjust Your Learning Design.
