New mobile application solutions are being adopted on campus and in the classroom to help shape the way educators teach, administer, and organize data in the learning environment. They combine compactness with the capability to store critical data. This will enhance learning outcomes and increase productivity.
These mobile solutions can be divided into in three groups: classroom collaboration, mobile learning, and mobile campus solutions.
Classroom collaboration
The first scenario, classroom collaboration, is helpful in promoting teacher and student interaction, improving participation, and increasing subject-matter retention. One successful classroom collaboration tool is the wireless student response system. In this, the teacher utilizes a wireless classroom to send a test, poll, or quiz to the students’ Pocket PCs, allowing the teacher to track the class’s (or individual’s) progress and lesson comprehension.
Depending upon the student response system capabilities, the teacher can review the student’s progress, identify what questions are answered or skipped, allow students to electronically raise their hands for assistance or ask questions, and then let the application automatically grade the handout or test. Some student response systems allow the district curriculum to be integrated into the teacher module so that state standards can be followed. Of the several student response systems on the market, one in particular has been adopted by many districts: Discourse by ETS (http://www.ets.org/discourse). You can view video case studies at http://www.ets.org/discourse/testimonials.html (see especially the fifth grade social studies example).
School districts can also use free student response systems developed at various universities, such as ClassInHand from Wake Forest (http://classinhand.wfu.edu) or Numina II SRS from the University of North Carolina (http://aa.uncwil.edu/numina/srs), which is a Web-based student response system using Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2000. This system provides various question interfaces: yes/no, multiple choice, long answer, sliding scale, and graphing plot.
In addition to student response systems, Windows Mobile devices have assisted educators in many classroom functions such as attendance tracking, grade keeping, lesson plans, student assessment, and tracking progress of assignments. State and federally funded initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Reading First are being addressed with reading assessment solutions that utilize the Pocket PC platform. Reading assessment solutions allow educators to easily track a student’s progress with better efficiency than paper-based solutions. An example of this is Achieve3000 reading assessment toolset (http://www.achieve3000.com), which, with its primary focus on reading comprehension, vocabulary, and a strong emphasis on writing, has correlated to higher gains on the ITBS reading scores.
Pocket PCs are also a platform for delivery of differentiated instruction via the Web. At River Hill High School in Howard County, Maryland, the students use their Pocket PCs to build language arts skills with TeenBiz3000 (http://www.achieve3000.com/teenbiz3000.php), a program that sends each student a news article and related activities via a secure e-mail system. The content is customized, or differentiated, so each student works at his or her own level using the Pocket PC device to read the articles and do the activities (Fig. 1). (See case study at http://www.achieve3000.com/casestudy/ppcstudy.htm.)
Fig. 1: TeenBiz3000 gives each student customized news content.
Mobile learning
