cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Liz Kolb
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on December 21, 2008
In today’s episode Kevin and I connected via Skype with Liz Kolb, author of the recently published Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education. Although the target audience for Liz’s book is those involved in the K-12 realm, an examination of the table of contents quickly makes clear that this book is for anyone who wants to understand the powerful educational potential of mobile technologies. Cell phones are arguably the most common mobile communication device owned and used by college students. In fact, while the 2008 Horizon Report predicted the adoption of mobile devices for widespread educational use within two to three years, the soon-to-be-published 2009 report has moved this time line up to one year or less. We owe it to our students to consider ways in which we can use these tools to provide additional opportunities for:
- skills development and refinement
- authentic, contextualized cultural experiences
- formative assessments
- just-in-time classroom feedback
Consider, for example, what Abilene Christian University is doing with iPhones and iPods.
In the course of our interview, Liz provided numerous practical examples of how language teachers could use cell phones in conjunction with the following web sites to take advantage of mobile technologies:
- Text Novel, an easy way to write a novel using your cell phone. See what Liz has to say about using this for education
- myMiaMia, a free, text messaging and call-in information service. According to their FAQ page, myMiaMia plans to roll out Dutch and French versions by the end of this year and a Chinese version in 2009
- drop.io, a free, file sharing site that you can also use to easily create podcasts
- FreeConferencePro for free conference calling for up to 200 people with recording and archiving features
- HeyCosmos, an auditory phone polling system that Liz suggests could be used in language courses
- Poll Everywhere, live sms or web-based polling that could easily replace those expensive clicker systems
- Flagr, which allows you to set up a private or public map where you can geotag your pictures along with your messages
- GeoGraffiti, which allows you to call in your oral messages and have them geotagged
- GrandCentral, what Liz describes as an übervoicemail system
Wesley Fryer has created a diigo group expressly for sharing resources about mobile learning. Kevin and I created a diigo group for followers of Around the World in A.T. Ways, where all of us can collect and share our finds related to language education and web 2.0 technologies.
And don’t forget Liz Kolb’s regularly updated blog, From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning—it’s a great resource for anyone interested in exploring cell phones in education.
cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Liz Kolb by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.worldatways.com/suggest-topics/.
About the author
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.