I had a student contact me recently to ask me a few questions about my thoughts on education.  I thought I would post them here.  He is making a documentary about using mobile phones in the classroom.  I hope he makes his documentary available - perhaps on YouTube and if he does I will link it here.  Meanwhile, here are my responses to his questions:
1. What do you believe are the benefits of using mobile devices in the classroom?
There are a couple of reasons using mobile devices in the classroom …

I think that the web offers a wide-range of wonderful learning opportunities for ESOL or NESB students.  It is really important that teachers know their students well enough and understand their needs, but also that teachers know the range of technologies that they have available to them to best support their students’ learning.
When we look at online learning opportunities, these range from applications that can be completely open - viewed and contributed to by anyone in the world, right through to applications that are very closed - only certain people …

I question why finding information needs to be difficult or time-consuming in order to make the learning happen. ie. I use wikipedia all the time as a starting place if I want to find information on a new topic - particularly if I know very little about that topic.

I recently wrote this article for the Education Review. It is a very concise summary of my thinking 6 months after completion of my research. “It seems somewhat ironic that while schools try to find extra funding to increase student and teacher access to ICT, the tool that many students already have in their pockets is overlooked and its use actively denied through restrictive school policy…”

This is another discussion that I am cross-posting from the School of Education online course in which I was a guest contributor. Popping it here to see what others think.
The modern web - namely web2.0 or the read/write web allows any user to create and share content with the world. Harnessing the power of this audience is certainly not limited to the secondary classroom - infact there are a huge number of highly successful primary school blogs, wikis and podcasts that attract audiences from around the world.
The fact …

Once again, this is cross posted from discussions I was contributing to in an online paper at the School of Education.
I was trying to share my feelings as to why it is often seen that the integration of ICT in secondary schools is lagging behind that of primary and ECE.
I think one of the things is that in secondary if teachers want to use the computers - they take their class to the computer room. There are very few computers in individual classrooms. This means that students go outside of …

I am cross-posting my contributions to a discussion thread on a School of Education Moodle thread where I provided my views on secondary students.
…The biggest difference between primary and secondary students in regards to their own ICT use is of course their age and maturity and the freedoms that come with this. For me what is also interesting is the skills and values that teenagers are assumed to have when using technology…
The Guardian published this article earlier in the year which created quite a stir online. It is written by …

I am privileged to work with an incredibly motivated and creative teacher who is always exploring the best ways to engage her students. She teaches French and was recently profiled in the New Zealand ICT PD Newsletter and I just wanted to cross-post the article here so as others who may not read the newsletter may be inspired by Florence as I have been! Check out her blog here and Florence is also on twitter look for @froggieflo

I have just recently completed a literature review exploring mobile phones in the classroom. It focuses solely on mobile phones as these are the tools our students already have. Here are my conclusions and a link to the full documents.

I recently was invited to participated as a guest in an online course run by the School of Education at the University of Waikato. The paper was a second year course “Telecommunications in Education”. My role was to facilitate and contribute to online discussion for one week. I thought I would cross-post some of the discussion starters I used here on my blog for other people to discuss also perhaps. Click to read more…