Smartphone Technology for Learning

I’m a newcomer to smart phones… my students have had them for years, but I’ve never had a reason to get one. So when we changed broadband providers I took up their offer of a mobile and invested in a little smart-phone… WOW!!! I have hardly used my PC in two weeks hence no blogs!

So once I’d got over Angry Birds I started looking at other stuff it could do, although technically I’m not over Angry Birds, I’m officially in rehab!!

The first thing I did was use the web browsing functionality to get into our works Moodle site. Which worked! I then managed to take a photo and upload it to one of the course image galleries. The importance of this cannot be overstated: now our students have a way of capturing a whiteboard or piece of paper and having it accessible to them outside of the classroom, outside of the building. Even potentially outside of the country!!

It also enables them to share it with the rest of their course. This enables groups to work on separate topics and projects and have a “mixing pot” where they can gain opinions and feedback which is stored online for them to refer to at a later date,

But that wasn’t the end of it as I needed  to download some MS Office files and my phone didn’t support them. So I downloaded an app called ThinkFree Office Mobile which allowed me to view them. Then I found that my phone manufacturer (HTC) had an Office viewer/editor app online called QuickOffice so I eventually settled for this. I found it less cumbersome to use.

I was then able to download and view Word, Powerpoint and pdf documents held on the site. I then started thinking about our course notes… if our students could view them on their phones then fantastic, but how can we make them more accessible, so that they can get to exactly the document they need.

I did a little research and stumbled upon QR codes, you might have seen these on products or in magazines.

This is one:

You can create these by going to a website such as http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ and within this complex pattern is a URL – a hyper-link to a website or file to download. They can be read by apps: I use QRdroid which can both read and generate these images but they don’t just have to hold URLs they can hold text, business card details… lots of stuff.

Now what we can do is to put these at the beginning of our presentations and our students can download their training notes, activity sheets, videos, even the slide-show that you are presenting and have it to hand on their mobile. You could use them to set homework or give a starting point for research. But the beauty is that once students understand what they are, you can place them on posters all around the place and they can choose to learn more. You could even have a kind of treasure hunt around the school as an orientation exercise linking to several web pages each providing information and a clue as to where to go for the next one.

The other thing that students can do with QR codes is to use them to share information. For example a student finds a particularly useful website – they can use a reader like QRdroid to generate a QR code from a URL and display it on the screen or save it as an image. This can then be uploaded to Moodle or scanned by another smart-phone and the recipient now has access to the same information.

Suddenly you start to enable mobile learning, mobile collaboration and you can begin to engender a 24hr learning culture. But I know what some people are thinking: what about those people who do not, or choose not to have a smart-phone. Well like I said earlier, up until two weeks ago I was one of those people. I can honestly say that now I will never be without one! But I do hear what you are saying.

The argument boils down to this; education should be totally inclusive, should have no barriers, it should be a level playing field.

Well I do agree with you, to some extent. But we must also understand the reality of those that we are teaching. We need to understand that teenagers nowadays use this technology as we used to read comics, magazines or listen to Sony Walkman’s (for those too young to know what these were they were the things before the things before MP3 players – they played tapes!). Culture shifts and if we do not embrace these changes we marginalize our students and byt virtue of this ourselves.

So how do I see this fitting in? Well believe it or not pretty much all of our students now have phones that can run these applications. So their use will take off, however some of our more die hard teachers will struggle to understand the benefits. More importantly some aspects of our organization actively prohibits their use on security grounds. So what do we do???

Well we do what we do with everything else. We don’t stop using electricity because it is dangerous we teach people how to use it properly, we educate them about the dangers and give them a safe environment to learn how to use it properly before letting them out in the real world to work on it. With smart-phones we teach them about the dangers of releasing sensitive information, of EMF hazards and where and when it is inappropriate to use them. We then give them the opportunity to demonstrate that they know how to use them in a safe training environment and react accordingly when things go awry.

By doing this you empower your students to learn, to socialize and to be more active in their learning. You can teach responsibility and self discipline along with a whole host of other secondary skills.

By not allowing the students to use their technology you not only lose the advantages of mobile learning, you remove the additional opportunity for a better rounded education and ultimately build resentment by removing what students see as a window to their world. We have seen this in our student population and we are beginning to take steps to change it.

Just one last thing. Follow the code!!

Style over substance?

This one will hopefully set the cat among the pigeons or even put some Piranhas in the tank as one of my friends says.

There is a common misconception that content is paramount to style. That what you say is far more important than how it looks. That if your content is sufficiently well worded or factually accurate then any style will be superfluous.

I hate to say this… I totally disagree.

Personally I see “Style over substance” as a phrase that some people use to be lazy, or to conform. Both are bad in my opinion. The other that I hear a lot of the time is that we must consider those with Specific Learning Differences like dyslexia, dyscalculia or dyspraxia. Again I feel that this is wrong, not because I discriminate against those with SpLD’s but because I feel that there are far better ways of doing things that make everybody’s life easier.

What we end up with in my teaching establishment is something along the lines of:

Yellow text in comic sans on a bright blue background

As someone interested in design this makes me feel physically sick!! Now imagine that you are a student who is having to sit through 7 hours of this a day… over as long as twelve months. At some point you have to ask yourself: WHY????

The answers that you get back are the two that I cited above: what about SpLD’s and my content is that good that it stands alone.

Well to dispel each of these in turn. Firstly it is true that high contrast between fonts and  backgrounds make reading easier for SOME people suffering with SpLD’s However, anyone that knows anything about scotopic sensitivity knows that each person is slightly different and that if you get the colours wrong then you make things worse. Therefore the opinion that we will be serving most people with SpLD’s better is, in my opinion, balderdash. We can serve everyone better by using the software properly, making the presentations available and teaching our students how to alter the colour schemes for themselves. In doing so we teach our students coping strategies that will enable them to move forwards and not be left abandoned when they leave.

The second point is that content stands alone. Hmmmm…. if that were true then there would be little work out there for web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, advertisers, movie directors, animators… you get the gist.

We need to make our content appealing to maintain interest – at the very least so that it does not put people off. But if we try hard we can make presentations that actually grip the attention of those listening. By not cramming them with information we create key points which the students can focus on, even better would be to use a single slide with a model map or another graphic organizer!

The simple truth is that we can work both smarter and more creatively to achieve more… in actual fact, a lot more.

There is a feature within PowerPoint (our tool of choice) that allows us to create a template by which all slides conform to. This is the Master Slide and you can find it under the View menu. The reason that this is so important is that if you design your master first and use it as a template for all the other slides then you can make a change on the master and it automatically updates every other slide. This reduces the amount of work that you need to do to produce the slide show initially but more importantly it makes your design infinitely more flexible.

Now you can design to your heart’s content, and should one of your students have trouble with your slide you can quickly tailor the slide-show to their needs. Even better than that:

They can download the slide-show from Moodle and alter it themselves so that it fits their needs exactly!

Now that you have done that, you can break free of the monotony of yellow on blue and begin to get creative. Have a faint picture as a backdrop or a smart gradient fill. Try other fonts, but choose Sans Serif fonts (without the squiggles on the letters) so that they are clear to read. And remember it is always best to get your presentation previewed on the medium that it will be used on, for example an interactive white board or a screen to make sure that the colours work. It is often best to get some help with this as a second opinion can bring in useful feedback and some brilliant ideas.

Most importantly TRY!!! If it doesn’t work the first time then try something different: colours, gradient direction, font, placement, images, borders, animation, transitions. Just remember that a slide must only be as complicated as it needs to be: a single word does not need lots of animation, an explanation of a circuit diagram may need more.

The way that I see things is that style adds to content. It helps to create the narrative and ethos of your lessons. The students see how much effort and care you have taken with your media, whatever it may be, and they will respond accordingly. More to the point, when you produce good work, you show it off to the best of your ability.

Good style coupled with good content produces an excellent backdrop for learning.

In the meantime, here’s some points to think about.

The way things are

Gradient fills

Adding contrast can add coherence

Too many styles loses coherence

Be Bold, Be Brave

Children are the future

My daughter wanted to be a fashion designer; she has loads of really good ideas for dresses, tops, skirts and trousers. But she’s a little bit too much like me – she loves computers.

Over the past few months she’s been looking at some of the work that I do and has been quite complimentary in her feedback. So I started to teach her a few things.

Firstly I scanned in some shapes that could be used as clothes and converted them into brushes in Photoshop. Then I showed her how to use them in “anger”, using layer styles to add patterns, effects and gradients. She became quite proficient but she soon tired of it as she ran out of brushes and combinations.

I’ve had her create a short (20secs) stop motion animation in MS Movie Maker that she planned and animated herself with her camera. But she seemed to bore of the repetitive nature of the task. She is like me: she hates monotony.

So I showed her Fireworks. I love Fireworks because it allows for a more structured creative experience. Vectors are much easier to manipulate and alter and the styles are easier to apply and reorder. Admittedly for image editing it does not have all the features of it’s big brother but then… it isn’t trying to be. So she got to grips with it and began to produce some good stuff.

Now she has moved back to Photoshop. She still uses Fireworks but now it is very much a tool and not an outlet. It is a means to an end. She is taking the concepts that she has learned and applying them to her Photoshop work, learning from me as she goes. I have no doubt that in time she will be an excellent designer.

The point that I am trying to make, albeit somewhat circuitously, is that we have to give our children, students and colleagues chance to grow and develop as individuals. With a little nurturing and encouragement they are a thing of beauty.

But for now I’ll let her work speak for itself:

Her sister

A gift

First commission!! :D

Experimenting with HSL and Layers

Fun with a name

Homework

More home work!

IE6!!!

For a laugh I thought that I’d try posting from work. Well… I say a laugh, actually it was more of a test.

Little did I know what a negative impact that using Internet Explorer 6 (!!) would have. Never again… at least not until I have some decent kit!!! :-/