Revision, Planning and Data capture

As we have become more experienced in what works and doesn’t work on mobile phone we have begun to focus our efforts in three specific areas when writing tools to support students - Revision, Planning and Data capture.

Why are we so focused only on these three areas? We believe that these are the areas where Handy Education (using convenient tools) is most useful and effective.

Revision / Practice

When revising the content of a course - most of your time is spent in one place with your text books (and other materials) around you - reviewing your notes and writing more concise notes. Of course not everyone revises in this way - but lets call this the most common approach. Is there a place for a mobile phone during these sessions? Maybe (I am sure the imaginative could crowbar in a way to include a phone in these sessions), but I think the phone comes into it’s own when away from these sessions.

We try to support students here by providing ways to do “micro-revision” to support these sessions - with Flashcards and quizzes to help practice recall of the ideas and concepts.

With process and technique based concepts like those of Mathematics the most effective way of learning the technique or process can be to repeat and practice it. There must be feedback to help the student understand where there are problems in the process, so the student learns to correct these problems.

We have been using mobile programs to help people work through mathematical problems, whilst providing immediate feedback with step by step instructions on how to correctly calculate the answers. These programs are less sophisticated than PC based equivalents - but the convenience of use means that they can be used many times to help build a students confidence in these problem areas.

Planning

Having convenient access to a list of outstanding work and upcoming deadlines is of great use to students (especially university students and adult learners who have to balance their studies with other parts of their life).

This data should be available to students in any way that they need to access it - via computer or phone or other device.

We are making sure this data is available in all these ways.

Data Capture

Capturing data about your workplace or  work situations is very useful in a number of vocational courses these learning diaries are used as new skills are aquired and practised at work. Being able to capture - audio notes, videos, pictures, text and structured data that can be used later by a student to review their progress and used in write-ups - is very convenient when using a mobile phone.

As we continue to develop our platform for students we are making sure all of these areas are covered.

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06.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, luzia research, mobile development, mobile phones, tools, uHavePassed Comments (0)

What we’ve been up to?

This could be of those blog posts that explains why there has been a long absence of blog posts, then goes on to explain explain why there will be more in the future and is shortly followed by a lack of blog posts again.

I’ll try to make sure it is not!

So what have we been up to?

We have been increasing the number of users of uHavePassed and currently have just over 3,000 people who have used it to pass their UK driving theory test. We have worked a lot on compatibility of uHavePassed with various handsets and also the communications that are used from the handset to our synchronisation server. We are really pleased how this is helping people and each bit of feedback has been great to receive - both positive and negative, as the product has developed.

The memory training and flashcard concepts in getawayphrases are in the process of being incorporated into uHavePassed allowing users to train their memory in addition to doing formative assessment.

We are looking for content partners and institutions to be able to increase the scope of content on uHavePassed.com beyond the UK driving theory test - so please get in contact if you are interested. We are already working with Leeds University and the Open University on this. More news soon…

With uHavePassed we are also in the process of launching a service so that organisations can use it to provide any assessment content to their users via web and mobile phone. More news soon….

We have also continued to work with the Open University on a couple of ad-hoc projects. These projects have been done at a very low cost and the aim is to push forward ideas and techniques in reasearch of the applications of mobile phones in higer education. Again more to follow….

I (Al) am now going to commit more time also to this blog and try to start up more of a conversation about how mobile phones can (and are) being used in education.

So on with the conversation…

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14.Jul.08 Driving theory test, education, getawayphrases, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, uHavePassed Comments (0)