What is it? Workshop at the ALT-C conference

When? 10:50 - 11:50 on Wednesday, 8 September 2010

Where? Main Auditorium, University of Nottingham

Come along and join Helen Keegan, Frances Bell, Josie Fraser, James Clay for a creative and lively session where participants will work in groups to produce snapshot ideas for using mobile phones in the classroom - using your very own mobile devices...

By the end of the session you will:

• have developed a conceptual understanding of a ‘guerilla EdTech’ approach to activity design
• be able to upload media from internet mobile devices to web sites, including geo-location services
• have acquired a range of sample media artefacts and learning activities for your students

BACKGROUND: Mobile devices in educational settings are powerful tools for supporting and recording learning, but have had mixed reactions from students. Some students see educational media such as podcasts as an intrusion into their personal use of technology; others who are given standard mobile devices for a project don't relate to them as 'personal' devices. Staff wishing to harness mobile learning technologies in their productive engagement with students can get distracted by the provision of technologies rather than focusing on learning outcomes.

This practical workshop will introduce participants to a range of ideas for using personal technologies to enhance the teaching and learning experience through student-generated content production and geo-location services. The emphasis is on pragmatic and resourceful practice by students and staff in using platform-agnostic media and services to support the learning process.

Participants will be introduced to new narratives using the mobile phone as a tool for data recording, media production and content sharing, and emerging web services as means of aggregating content from multiple platforms. Geo-location services will be introduced from the perspective of using hyper-local mobile phone applications in education, in order to give participants an idea of how these techniques could be used more widely in a learning context.

Taking a ‘guerilla narrative’ approach to rapid learning design, participants will then work in groups to produce learning activities which take advantage of the devices in students’ pockets. Each group will produce 3 'snapshot' ideas - audio, image and video - for using mobile technologies in the classroom. Using their own mobile phones participants will record their snapshots/learning activities, producing media artefacts which can then be uploaded and shared with the wider community via the session wiki.