Mobile Learning for Kids

This article is an endorsement by Bob Sanregret, Rani Wemel, and Hot Lava Software. 

Mobile technologies are a familiar part of the lives of most teachers and students in the UK today. Every new generation of technology, challenges our world view and paradigms. For example, a paradigm shift occurred when people transitions from listening to the radio to watching television programs. Another example is when people went from using stand-alone personal computers to accessing the Internet. It’s no surprise that mobility is causing yet another paradigm shift.

As mobile connectedness continues to sweep across the landscape, the value of deploying mobile technologies in the service of learning and teaching seems to be both self-evident and unavoidable.

Hot Lava Software, provides mobile content solutions, mobile content authoring toolkit, Learning Mobile Author to Corporations and Universities around the World. This toolkit allows rapid creation and deployment of mobile content to multiple devices such as Palm, Pocket PC, Blackberry and the desktop.

Using portable devices to support teaching and learning is not a new concept in educational circles. Calculators were a revolutionary addition when they were first introduced to the classroom a few decades ago but are now often a requirement for mathematics, statistics and business classes. Currently, laptop computers used in higher education settings outnumber desktop and laboratory computers on campus, while notebook computers are ranked as the most important hardware issue on campus today.

Mobile devices are affecting our society in numerous ways and the relevantly easy access to personal mobile computing devices, including wireless access points, laptops, tablet PCs, PDAs, mobile telephones, Bluetooth-enabled devices, and fusion devices such as camera-phones, PDA-phones, and phone/PDA/MP3-players, are once again raising the bar for academia. No demographic is immune from this phenomenon.

The decision to move to a wireless environment rests on a number of factors. The three main concerns for education institutions are how to design and implement a system that is cost effective, is secure and has a fast, reliable bandwidth servicing as wide as possible an area. The cost of developing or expanding a wired network is already much more expensive - twice as much as for wireless systems, according to some estimates.

The benefits students/users in the short, mid and long term can be realized as;

• even the most basic of activities can be embedded within a meaningful learning context.
• being mobile adds a new dimension to the activities that can be supported.
• by effectively coupling an informatic layer with the social network layer, learning gains can be significant
• the informal nature of the devices can lead to positive rewards

In simple terms, digital equity means that all students will have access to information and communications technologies so they can prepare for living and working in today’s world. Yet disadvantaged schools and students have many challenges and lack resources. Access to devices and technology is the latest problem.

Access means having technology for learning available on demand. Sure, schools are supposed to be the great equalizer – providing technology to students equitably and making sure that all students use modern learning tools.

But recent studies report that although there are many more desktop computers in schools than ever before, children aren’t using them much. There aren’t enough of them; they aren’t where and when students need them, and they aren’t personal. But with handhelds, each student can have a personal handheld computer anytime and anyplace.

This world is becoming digital. Students need to learn with digital tools in order to succeed. They can improve skills, find new learning opportunities, and prepare for the future with handheld computers. Absolutely portable and inexpensive, handheld computers offer true digital equity – a computer in every child’s hand. With them, all students are empowered to reach their potential.

The challenge for educators and designers, however, is one of understanding and exploring how best we might use these resources to support learning. That we need to do this is clear – how much sense does it make to continue to exclude from schools, powerful technologies that are seen as a normal part of everyday life?

The future of the Paperless classroom can be seen in a school in Kentucky, USA. The classroom uses Windows CE and Pocket PC based Personal Digital Assistants (we call them PDAs.)  They are running a paperless classroom with the PDAs.  All homework and reading assignments are done on the PDAs. They do not use copied ditto sheets or heavy textbooks.  All of this is accomplished in a 7th and 8th Grade Language Arts class, not in a math or science classroom yet.  This is not a sci-fic notion; it is reality in this school!

At Hot Lava Software, we do believe that higher education is capable of adaptation and change, particularly where mobile learning solutions are concerned. The reason for optimism is simply this whether we like it or not, whether we are ready for it or not, mobile learning represents the next step in a long tradition of technology-mediated learning.

It will feature new strategies, practices, tools, applications, and resources to realize the promise of ubiquitous, pervasive, personal, and connected learning. It responds to the on-demand learning interests of connected citizens in an information-centric world. It also connects formal educational experience with informal, situated learning experience.

Mobile learning isn't a substitute for a “great teacher” or a “great class experience." Instead, mobile phones may find a recognized place in the schoolrooms globally, I believe in 5-10 years or so we may see, rather than cell phones being banned in classrooms, they will be required, as was once the case with slide rules and calculators.

I expect many teachers to be distributing material over the wire, and polling students in the class to see how they are progressing. Students themselves will increasingly use their cell phone or other wireless device as a tool that they couldn't go to school without.

Every decade or so, learning and human performance technology gets a new boost, a new medium through which it can inform, communicate, interact, empower, and enlighten ... “We are at the beginning of a new way of working, shopping, playing, communicating and learning”.  

Hot Lava Software’s Authoring Tools and their Learning Management Systems helps institutions and organizations to developing mobile learning applications the fast and easy way.

Contact us here for more information on Learning Mobile Author call 703-973-4409 or email: sales@hotlavasoftware.com Take the opportunity to share in our expertise and insight. Visit Hot Lava Software at www.hotlavasoftware.com.

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