In which I debrief after ACTFL 2009
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on November 23, 2009
At the ACTFL09 conference I gave a talk entitled “The Technology of Classroom 007: Mobile Computing and Language Instruction”. In it I described a classroom at Marist College, room 007, where I occasionally teach. The irony of its number lies in the fact that it is a basement room, underground with no windows. I therefore must teach Spanish in a theoretical bubble and not through a thrilling global adventure of international intrigue. I suspect this is the case at most institutions where the spatial layout of our classroom sadly remain unchanged since the establishment of the university system in the fifteenth century. Yes, we’ve added, blackboards, then whiteboards, followed by smartboards. But these “breakthrough” technologies have done little to break the educational paradigm of another era. If we truly believe in a new kind of education for the 21st century, our educational spaces must reflect this shift. As promised, here’s the visual aide for my presentation. I’ve summarized my talk below it.
The educational technologies we choose to purchase for and deploy in our institutions must reflect the learning goals of the new millennium. They must therefore be more nimble, more portable and more evenly distributed among the student population. The installation of expensive smartboards at the teacher’s station or Sony language labs enhance one classroom but do little to reinvent an educational ecosystem. I therefore asked the audience to consider the mobile devices that pervade our society: cell phones, mp3 players, netbooks, laptops and smartphones. I also introduced the group to less know devices such as Livescribe’s Pulse Pen, David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi’s Siftables, the Flip video camera, or the soon-to-be released tablets from Microsoft and Apple.
We then discussed three technological developments to better link the physical world and digital world, allowing for the future classroom to be the world itself and the student to leave the walls of the classroom to gather information, interpret it and send it back to his/her instructor from anywhere. We discussed the pedagogical possibilities of Google voice, a subject on which I have posted previously. I demonstrated the use of Google voice by asking each table to discuss the classroom use for the service and call me on my Google Voice number. We also reviewed the geotagging capabilites of a mobile phone via such services as Geograffitti, Flagr and Cinchcast. For more information on the use of cell phones in the classroom I suggest you listen to Barbara Lindsey’s and my interview with Liz Kolb, author of the book, Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education.
Next, we defined QRCodes, 2-dimensional bar-codes that can be read by a mobile phone’s camera or a webcam and direct one to a spot on the Internet. QR codes link the physical world to the digital world and can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom. For example, one can create a scavenger hunt in which the codes lead to clues and your students use mobile devices to work together, travel the school grounds, gather the clues and solve the mystery. Too, instructors could create handouts with QRcodes so that students, for instance, watch a video before they answer questions on the sheet. We discussed how to generate and read such codes. Kaywa, for example allows one to easily link the code to a URL, text, phone number or SMS. If you access the web with the Firefox browser, I suggest installing a plugin for automatically generating 2D bar-codes for the sites you visit. Finding a good reader can be more complex as it depends on your device. For most mobile phones, I suggest you look up your model and install the software suggested on this site. Moble-BarCodes.com has also proved to be a good source of information. If you own an iPhone, the best QRcode reader that I’ve tested is NeoReader.
The talk concluded with a demonstration of the new Augmented Reality services available for the iPhone 3GS or the latest Google Android devices. These phones use data gathered from GPS, an accelerometer and a compass to determine the exact location, angle and direction of the phone. This allows for anyone to tag the world and have it visible when one looks through the camera. The best example of this capability is a product called Wikitude, the “worldbrowser”. You must watch a video of the software in use to appreciate it’s use and potential. I punctuated the talk with a statement suggesting that once the power of Wikitude is in the hands of every student, we must push them into the world to discover it, tag it and reflect upon it. Only then will we have an authentic education for the 21st century.
I have posted my presentation above, please meander through it and explore the links I provide. When you’re done, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ask your students to take out their phones and incorporate these devices into a lesson. Then, report back by clicking on the Google voice button below explaining the assignment and how it went. I’d like to do another post in the future that synthesizes what you’ve done and even includes your voices in the post.
If you’d like to see clips of the talk, here’s a bit taken from Kyle Murley’s iPhone using Qik. Thanks Kyle for capturing some moments and simultaneously demonstrating a classroom use for phones!
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