Years ago when I first started teaching, none of this capability was available. I recall struggling to get my head around working with Word documents in Windows 3X or 3.1 as it was known. Nothing made sense to me and I could not really see the point or advantage of working digitally, manual layouts and writing by hand was where it was at. Now some 13 years later I work fluently with over 80 applications across Mac and Windows platforms.
My first mobile device was a Nokia and it was just the basic phone with some capability like taking and storing images, storing contacts and audio files, never in my wildest dreams would I have even then imagined that any future mobile device would become my second ,if not often primary workstation, for creating documents, images, audio and accessing Web 2 services.
On my phone I have over 150 apps that are work related, no games etc, I use my iPhone and iPad now nearly as much as I do my Mac’s, Windows PC and Laptop.
From my Phone I can mark and check my rolls using our networked version of Academy or locally via apps like Attendance. I can access our school intranet and the desktop of my work PC via my phone / ipad, use my phone to control Keynote presentations running on my iPad connected to IWB. I can access and edit my Edublogs, WordPress and Edmodo sites and my students can access and write to their Edmodo pages via iPhone if they have the Edmodo app.
For me, this is the most exciting area of development and whilst still very much Web2, the possibilities for development fall under the projected expectations for Web3, where web services begin to function more like a personal assistant.
So this is where I’ll be exploring mobile device use in the educational environment
R . E . W . I . R . E . D 