Tuesday, November 20, 2012

CPIT lunch time PD session: Mobile learning apps


The CPIT Centre for Educational Development (CED) and the Learning Technologies Unit (LTU) has been running a series of professional development sessions this term. Today’s lunch time session was on mobile apps. Almost 30 tutorial and learning support staff attended. Katrina Fisher provided some examples of the work she has been doing following completion of the Ako Aotearoa net tablets project. Included is the work on developing video content supported by quizzes and glossaries that students access via Moodle. Shifting content from tablet to Moodle opens access to web enabled hardware.

Sam Hegarty then provided a show and tell of several useful iOS apps.He started with evernote as a good option to upload content on to the cloud and access through a range of devices and operating systems.

Nearpod was met with great enthusiasm. This app allows a teacher to share the image on their screen with other iOS devices. The app includes options for quizzes, sketching, polls and picture/website/video sharing. Something we will need to test with a large number of tablets through a CPIT wifi site. The app seemed to run in a timely manner during the demo when there were about a dozen devices accessing the site.

Socrative was recommended by one of the staff as a multi-platform alternative although it did not have quite all the options that were available on Nearpod. Its main objective is to be a ‘student or audience response’ system.

Educreations allows a recording of a lesson in the form of whiteboard notes and audio. Photos can be attached and annotated. Basically a screen capture plus voice recording of a short interactive ‘learning presentation’. 

By a nice coincidence, Derek Wenmouth’s blog today was on Bring your own device (BYOD). This was one barrier raised by staff – the expense of obtaining tablets and the lack of support for non-windows OS devices at present. Therefore, an important next step is to establish institutional BYOD policy that is visible to staff and students, providing clear guidelines on what is institutionally supported.

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