Lessons learnt

Back at work & reflecting on the visit to SPS, Ennerdale, SA. Both times I have come back feeling very honored to have met some wondered people who have made me feel very welcome into their lives & community.

What have we learnt?…

What this project continues to highlight to me is that you don’t need to have the latest all singing, all dancing technology to help students learn…

This basic phone is helping the students become engaged and learn. ‘We’ seem to over-complicate things by having lots of choices on offer but at the end of the day, its all about the content. As one person said ‘it won’t matter if you use a walkman or an iPod, it’s about the content.’

What do you think, right or wrong?

Support concerns

• On the ground the School has teacher & the school governors support.
• The teachers have voiced how they feel the project has gone so far (good & bad) but in terms of ongoing support and making the project sustainable in the future, they were unclear & seemed a little nervous how they would do this.

Time concerns

• Teachers have said that one of the frustrations is time. There is not enough time to charge, prepare especially when the devices are shared among classes.
• To charge, clean (remove files from phones), add content takes quite a while especially if you’ve got 20-40phones per lesson & you are not the only class using them that day/week

How to bring mobile learning into the classroom

• In theory introducing new ways of learning is seriously exciting and opens up so many doors but it can also be quite a nervous journey especially if you can’t see how it will work.
• Some teachers were confident how they would incorporate mobile learning into their lessons
• Some teachers were unsure how they would have time to use m-learning as well as deliver the lesson
• Some were uncertain and couldn’t see how the ideas could fit into the classroom

Deploying content

• Along with the above, adding content was a huge issue for the teachers.
• how & when they would add their content
• how can they be sure their content wouldn’t be overwritten by other teachers or students
• Storage space - the more content, media you add to a phone the less memory you’re going to have.
• with 7 teachers involved in the project how are they going to manage this?

Training

• Who’s going to train them, new teachers, students about the phones, planning lessons etc
• They loved having Lucy & I there for support & training but what happens once we’ve gone

What can we do?…

Support

• While we were there we set up a couple of teachers with Skype & email
• These guys will help set up accounts for the other teachers
• They have our Skype & email addresses & the project intends to make contact fortnightly
• They’ll also be able to use the project laptop at the school to contact us when needed for more support

Learning materials

• We’ve introduced the school to, & we’ve trained him on how to load, take care of the devices; Blake Haddon
• New, updated content for the lessons will be provided by Lucy and loaded onto the SD cards by Blake. This will help the teachers to plan how to use the phones in their lesson without the added pressure of loading the content onto 20-40 devices.
• The content will initially be placed into ‘subject folders’ as time goes on the project will check and amend to what works best.

Eventually the teachers will build up more confidence to write, provide their own content to use in lessons.

Training

• The idea is to provide ‘online training sessions’ for the teachers involved in the project. These will be fortnightly.
• Eventually the teachers trained will be able to pass their knowledge onto new teachers, students – even in the future to other schools.

The outcome of the project is to make sure whatever happens it’s sustainable at the schools. The project will finish this year but we’ll continue to help the great people with met!