Implementing mobile

It is getting harder to find How To sessions devoted to specific digital tools at IATEFL compared to previous years. I guess that this is because digital tools are becoming more mainstream. So the mood is moving more towards implementation at an institutional level. The good people at The Consultants-E, Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly have been pioneers in exploring and training teachers in the use of mobile devices for learning especially with their recent book, Going Mobile: teaching with handheld devices, which came out last December. Nicky was at IATEFL talking about, not individual apps and activities, but about a framework for implementing the use of mobile devices within an institution.

Of course in some contexts this is absolutely off the agenda. Nicky mentioned that in new York mobile devices have been banned from classrooms by law. But even during her research, using mobiles with a group of classes in Cambridge in 2013, Nicky noticed that the teacher next door had a routine of collecting all mobile devices at the beginning of her classes and only returning them to students at the end of the class, while in her own classroom Nicky was asking her students to use their mobile devices as an integrated part of the course. It was this contrast which prompted Nicky to think about the need for an institutional approach to the use of mobile devices for learning rather than on a class by class, teacher by teacher basis. See her talk about the session in this interview with Nik Peachey.

Nicky’s 10-step implementation plan was much photographed:

1. Identify your reasons
2. Assess your context
3. Involve all the stakeholders (indluing parents in the case of YLs)
4. Present your case
5. Create learning plans
6. Assign teacher champions
7. Run a pilot phase
8. Evaluate your pilot phase
9. Extend the implementation plan
10. Provide on-going teacher development

Some of the issues Nicky addressed included whether to adopt a BYOD (bring your own device), class sets or hybrid approach. Nicky’s experience is that learners buy in to the approach much more using their own devices. That in turn means that the teacher has to ensure that whatever activities are proposed work across all platforms such as iOS, Android and Blackberry. Another pre-requisite was good. reliable wi-fi connectivity so that learners are not using their data plans to complete activities. And finally there was a plea to include an element of assessment of the digital work in ordert to recognise the skills learners had demnstrated in completing the activities with them.

Take a look at Nicky’s slides here:

More resources on the implementation of m-learning can be found here.

Full disclosure: I have been working with The Consultants-E developing and tutoring courses since 2009!