On the 22nd and 23rd June 2105 the faculty of Science & Engineering organised “Apple Mobile Learning Day” events on Medway campus and in Stockwell Street respectively. My colleague Yang Yang attended in Medway, whilst I went to Stockwell Street. This interesting event demonstrated the use of a number of iPad apps in teaching and learning. The focus was on academic staff using the iPad to create content that can be used in a variety of teaching activities (e.g. flipped classroom teaching, giving audio visual feedback, interactive quizzes and voting in classrooms). For most scenarios students don’t necessarily need to have an iPad or iPhone as the output formats of most of the demonstrated apps were in standard open content formats (e.g. HTML or mp4).
The (mostly free) apps that were presented in the context of different teaching scenarios included Nearpod, Padlet, Explain Everything, Thinglink and Aurasma to name just a few. Explain Everything (http://explaineverything.com/) is an interactive screencasting whiteboard app that enables academics to annotate and narrate content that is imported from different file formats including pdf, image files, video, powerpoint and keynote and export them once annotated to a standard video format. This could be useful to provide student feedback or to create teaching resources. Nearpod (http://www.nearpod.com/home.php) is an application that enables teachers to create closed online group spaces for student cohorts for example to share presentations with interactive elements (e.g. quizzes) in real-time with the cohort. Students submit answers and responses and the educator can see an overview and analysis of responses to get feedback about student’s progress. Padlet (https://padlet.com/) is an app that enables the collaborative creation of shared and moderated interactive walls that can contain text or other media. These boards enable a focused discussion around a topic and provides functions for collaboration. Thinglink (https://www.thinglink.com/) is an app that enables the creation of interactive images with hotspots for annotation. These hotspots can for example contain video links (e.g. YouTube), images, text or short quizzes. The output format is standard HTML so that resources that are created in this way could for example be used as resources for flipping the classroom (see our earlier post on flipping). Aurasma was explored more fully at the Medway workshop, and Yang reports:
“Aurasma (http://www.aurasma.com) is a augmented reality platform, available as a free app for iOS and Android devices. It uses advanced image and pattern recognition to blend the real-world with rich interactive content such as videos and animations. You can simply use your phone to take a picture of a text book or any object and Aurasma allows you to link a video clip/animation to this object. Once the link is set up, you can use your phone to scan the real object and the video will play automatically in your phone. At the workshop on the Medway campus, we discussed its application during university open days. More interestingly perhaps, we also discussed how this app could be used in Forensic Science to reconstruct a crime scene for students to investigate.”
The two mobile learning workshops were highly interactive with plenty of opportunities for participants to explore the different apps, to discuss potential uses for teaching and learning and to point out pitfalls to watch out for. Different example teaching and learning scenarios were tested through small group activities so that participants could create content and work with the created materials to get an idea of the user experience. Overall the workshops were an interesting and worthwhile opportunity to explore non-institutional TEL (Technology-Enhanced Learning) technologies, some of which could be integrated with relatively little effort in institutional learning designs to increase the interactivity of lectures and tutorials.
If you would like to explore any of the ideas in this post further in your own teaching and learning, do get in touch with us at greenwichconnect@gre.ac.uk
Image adapted from “Ipad is coming” by Jacco van Giessen, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic licence