mLearning and Digital Images

Picture this scene: You ask your students to open their books to work on a grammar exercise. You decide to walk around to check how they are doing the exercise, but you, unfortunately, realize some students are actually using their mobile devices to check updates on Facebook and Twitter or sending an SMS to a friend. 

Would you call that fiction? Definitely not! I am quite sure this has already happened to you if you teach tennagers! So, how do you deal with it? Should you ban mobile devices from your classroom? Every time new technologies land in the classroom, students do naturally react with excitement to them. After a while they get used and tend to calm down. As an educator, I believe that we should never ignore the "world" students live in, but rather find ways to bring it to the learning environment. The number of students who own mobile devices has skyrocketed in recent years and the prediction is that every single person will have a digital camera, a cellphone or a tablet in the near future. In some cases, some might already have them all! So, how about thinking of ways to use these devices creatively in order to effectively teach and practice different grammar points and even improve levels of interaction and communication? Here is one idea I have recently developed for the typical ESL/EFL setting. This activity can be used to practice vocabulary related to clothing and the present continuous as well!

Activity: What's the Occasion?

Level: beginning/intermediate 
Vocabulary: clothing
Grammar topic: Present Continuous
Language skill: speaking 
Device needed: any device with a built-in digital camera
Number of devices needed: one per student 
Internet connection: offline

This is a class project that requires in-class and outside-class work. 

Part 1: On the first day, give each student a slip with a particular situation written in it (EX: GOING TO SCHOOL/CHURCH/WORK/THE BEACH/THE CHURCH/THE MALL/THE GYM/A WEDDING/A JOB INTERVIEW/ A ROMANTIC DINNER/ A FAMILY PICNIC/A NIGHTCLUB/ETC...). 

Remind them that they should not reveal which situation they were given. Then, explain that they should go home, pick up in their closet the outfit they would wear for that occasion and take pictures of all items (clothes/shoes/accessories) and a picture of themselves wearing the outfit for that occasion. 

Part 2: On the second day, ask students to sit in small groups. Explain that they should show the pictures they have taken (and orally say the name of all clothing items) and other group members should guess where their classmates are going dressed like that. As a follow-up, ask students to show the picture in which they are wearing their outfit and have other classmates describe using the Present Continuous (ex: you are wearing a pink dress, high heels, a watch and a necklace). You can also have them vote on the student who was best dressed for the assigned occasion. 

Alternative suggestion: In part 1, ask students to send you via e-mail their picture wearing the outfit. Then, in part 2, you can show the pictures of all students in a slide presentation and elicit from them the sentences in the Present Continuous (follow-up part).

I hope you liked it and let me know if you ever have the chance to test it with your students. I am a mobile learning junkie and I display all my ideas in my blog http://mthatlearning.blogspot.com. If you want to learn more about mobile learning, be my guest!

Going Mobile

                                 


Nowadays, it's much easier to find interesting ideas online that can cause a great impact on our teaching practice. One of these days, I came across a blog called Mapping Media to the Curriculum which starts with a very simple question: what do you want to create today? The author talks about different apps that students can use to produce digital content. I explored some of the ideas and decided to experiment with Mobile Learning (mLearning). Learning a language has to be a dynamic and automonous process.  However, I had some questions on the back of my mind:

Does Mlearning add value to my lessons?
What are the benefits?
Can I use it with all group levels effectively?
Do I have to work harder?

I got together with  Jose Antonio and we presented a workshop called - One Ipad-Only Class - to tell our peers about our experiences, tips and ideas regarding mlearning. Here you can read about what we said.

We talked about the main characteristics of each age group, and we showed activities that are easy to carry out to maximize learning that respect the aforementioned general traits.

We started talking about adult learners. What are the main characteristics? What should a task designer have in mind when planning a task?

The adult learner

                            http://www.freakingnews.com/Van-Gogh-Modernized-Pictures----3289.asp

• Long attention span.
• Ability to deal with tasks that are not intrinsically motivating.
• To maximize learning plan tasks that appeal to multiple senses and lower affective filters.

Su 

We then suggested some  activities that we used with our groups. It's important to mention that all the APPS used worked offline and are free. Click on the links below for details.
Proverbs  
Order of adjectives
Subordinating conjunctions

The teenage learner

• Child- like playfulness
• Adult-like ability to hypothesize and think critically
• Facts surrounding ego, self -esteem and  self- image are at pinnacle.
• Teachers should affirm talents and strengths and encourage collaboration

Suggested activities

Story telling 

The young learner

Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

• Concrete operation
• Centeredness in functional purposes of the language
• Can understand patterns and examples

Suggested activities

The Weather Book

Doodling songs

José Antonio and I counted with the contribution of Denise De Felice, who added a prespective on how the brain works and how/why the proposed activities might be effective to boost learning.


When I reflect upon my experience, I come to the conclusion that Mlearning can be very powerful if we hold truth to our teaching principles, respect our students and find the correct practices that mirror our beliefs. I have gone mobile. Have you?