Pedagogical Uses of Cell Phone Apps

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For most of us, using apps has become second nature. Not only do those little programs allow us rapid access to information, they also enable us to connect, share, and collaborate. There are already various apps available for educational purposes; however, they still only find their way into the classroom inertly.

So, this blog post is designed as a means to share various offerings and to put them into, what I believe, are important pedagogical categories:
1. Increasing time-management skills
Even a simple app such as the one controlling the camera can help speed up the process of note-taking. For instance, students don’t have to write down the information on the board stoically anymore if they can simply take a quick snapshot with their cameras. As an instructor, it does take some time getting used to seeing students take photos of the board. But in an era in which efficient time management skills are crucial ingredients for success, it doesn’t hurt showing students that technology can, indeed, make our lives easier. Of course, other apps can also help students here such as the note-taking app Evernote to more dedicated education apps such as GeoGebra for studying math. What speaks in the apps’ favor is that students work within multimodal, interactive environments that are usually updated on a regular. All in all, there are various apps out there that instructors and students can and, I believe, should check out.
Yet, in my opinion the allure of cell phone apps for educational purposes becomes especially pronounced once we start treating apps as potential avenues for students to become (co-) producers of learning.
2. Developing active students
Beyond their affordance to offer almost instantaneous access to a wealth of information, apps can also empower students to become active contributors of learning content. Students can use their cell phones for multimodal, interactive assignments, for instance. The integrated camera and microphone allows them to conduct interviews wherever they go. Dedicated study group apps such as MyPocketProf allow students to teach one another when they study for major exams without having to be in the same place at the same time. Finally, programs such as the free Spreaker app can be used to create and share podcasts with ease. All of these apps allow students to become more exposed to technology, and instructors can help students to hone those skills for their later professional careers.
Many instructors, however, shy away from allowing students to use those tools because they already feel overwhelmed not only because of the sheer number of apps that are currently available, but also because instructors don’t want to allow their students to use tools that they don’t even know how to operate themselves. There is certainly sense in that. I would never recommend to a colleague to use a tool in the classroom because it’s supposed to be the latest and most trendy thing right now. So, never jump on the bandwagon. Still, I encourage instructors to take some time and familiarize themselves with these kinds of applications.
Our team at the Student Innovation Fellowship program is also here to advice instructors who are thinking about using these new tools in the classroom. So, feel free to message me if you have any questions. Also, if you know of other apps that would work well in an educational context, please leave a comment below.

A Sifendipity that turned into an activity

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This week I have been quite busy conducting interviews for my hybrid pedagogy promotion project, and one aspect that came up frequently during those interviews was my interviewee’s particular reservation against using the microblogging platform Twitter for pedagogical purposes. Most interviewees said they don’t (like to) use Twitter because it would sent their teaching into a tailspin, thereby making it more difficult to administer the students’ learning experience.

I can certainly understand the attitude. Once we go hybrid with our pedagogy, we introduce additional spaces into the learning experience and it can become quite overwhelming not only to administer the content that students produce on Twitter, but also to use that content for assessment, not to mention that in every class there will be students who don’t use social media tools at all (at least that has been my experience so far). So, from that angle, I can surely understand how Twitter can be quite intimidating at first.

However, a couple of days ago I found an email in my inbox from a research-sharing website which contained a paper on the rhetoric of hashtags by Daer, Hoffman, and Goodman, titled “Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications,” and here I can certainly see the merit of using Twitter in the classroom for critical thinking exercises as well as for practicing analytical skills. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, hashtags are used to connect Twitter messages to larger conversations. Hashtags are words or unspaced phrases that follow the number sign (#), and they can be placed anywhere in a tweet. But beyond its ability to construct a conversation space, a hashtag can also tell users in each instance a thing or two about the contextual configuration of that space. In other words, by looking at the hashtag we can draw inferences as to whether the conversation space was created to inform, identify, entertain, critique, rally, or maybe motivate. Check out a couple of hashtags below and think about the underlying purpose of the conversation space in each case:

#geeiamsubtle

#firstworldproblems

#goodtoknow

#standyourground

#digped


For a composition class or a critical thinking class,  in which questions of audience awareness and purpose are important topics of discussion, I can certainly see the benefit of using Twitter. Surely, Twitter can also teach us a thing or two about the advantages of brevity in writing, but this only goes so far. I find that Twitter would work better for analysis exercises. I imagine that an activity could be that students choose a hashtag, identify its purpose, and then analyze a set of tweets in relation to the extent to which they fulfill the purpose of the conversation space. In order to capture the tweets and turn the activity in for assessment, students could use the free webtool Storify, which allows users to collect and curate material from the internet.

I will certainly try this activity out in the future. If you think the activity is interesting, and you get a chance to do it, then please comment and let me know how it went.

 

Cheers,

Thomas