Using mobile phones in geography education

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

Postcrossing in primary schools - Geography education department

If you've not already heard of it, Postcrossing is a website that connects people through postcards.

The goal of the project is to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free. Well, almost free! The main idea is that: if you send a postcard, you will receive at least one back from a random Postcrosser from somewhere in the world.

How does it work? The short version:

1. request an address from the website
2. mail the postcard to the address
3. wait to receive a postcard
4. register the received postcard in the system

After reading about a school using postcrossing as a class project, I thought I'd suggest it to the Geography education department as something to look into.

Using flickr geotagging to learn about geography

The geography education department have been working with GPS-enabled mobile phones for a while now, using the packaged educational software. One of the most important things about wildknowledge, that made is useful for geography education was the ability to geotag images.

Geotagging is adding geographical data to an object, for example marking where a photo was taken. By geotagging photos we can plot them on a map and build up a picture of where all the photos were taken.

Geotagging also works with other services, like Twitter, so show where users are broadcasting from, and this presents us with a whole host of possibilities.

The Geography department and the e-learning team are looking at ways to utilise flickr's geotagging in education. This project is looking to use flickr's native geotagging ability to recreate functions that may be prohibitively expensive for many schools.

This project is still in it's formative stages at present. Watch this post for further developments

---

UPDATE - 26 November 2009
Been looking at imapflickr - this is a website that makes customised google maps from geotagged information on flickr. This could be useful