A special session was run for the 1st year geography education students on using mobile phones in the classroom. The session was run by Andy Hoang (E-learning advisor for the department of education) and Stephen Ruddick (3rd year geography education student) and aimed to utilise the smartphones in the students pockets to distribute and collect data for learning and presentation.
The mobile smartphone is a powerful tool that can be used to display many types of multimedia from text and photos to videos and audio. Smartphones have huge potential in the classroom as a means to get personalised information out to students. With many students at university now owning a smartphone, we decided to run the lesson using the students own mobile phones.
There is a wealth of information available to learners on the internet, that's easily accessible on a smartphone, but as it's difficult to input long, complex web addresses (URLs). To overcome this we used QR codes to encode URLs, photos and videos and Google docs to publish our own custom documents on the internet for students to download.
QR codes look like this
You can use the barcode reader on your smartphone to open a video on using the digital compass - it will play on your phone.
The lesson started with a treasure hunt. Directions were encoded in a QR code like below
This gave groups directions around the campus, including links to some cryptic images that confirmed where they were along the way. To get to the places mentioned, students needed to use the digital compass built in to their phones. We also provided analogue compasses for students to compare.
When students got to their destination, they found another QR code, with instructions for an investigative task, to do with improving their campus environment. Students were asked to investigate a different element of infrastructure such as signage, catering or outdoor leisure and they were asked to collect evidence supporting their argument of how the campus could be improved. They could use any type of supporting media they wanted.
Students went out and took video interviews, photos and audio recordings, then came back and downloaded their findings on to a netbook computer, which was then used to put a very short presentation together for the class.
The lesson lasted two and a half hours and the time seemed to fly by. Students were engaged and excited to get out and about and didn't stray off track at all. Overall the lesson seemed to go down very well with the students and we hope to see some of them taking this out to schools
