IPods in the classroom bring curricula within reach from HCC Southeast on Vimeo.
In Catherine Smith’s class they touch and pinch and drag until it all sticks. After a brief primer from behind the teacher’s desk, the still-growing fingers of Stephen F. Austin High School students reach for touch-sensitive screens as the focal point of a new pedagogic protocol.
“It’s a very unique way of teaching nowadays,” admits Gabriela Limon, a precocious sophomore in the business and computer systems class filled mostly with juniors and seniors.
The palm-size screens belong to Apple’s popular iPod Touch, the primary platform with which Ms. Smith’s 20 dual-credit summer school students receive their lessons, take notes and schedule assignments. The unique class, the only one of its kind that the practitioners are aware of, is part of a nascent approach in education sectors called “mobile learning,” which seeks to engage an intuitively wireless generation with state-of-the-art teaching tools.
“For years they’ve been using traditional teaching methods where the teacher will come out, talk for an hour or an hour and a half, and then have the students do work,” says Ms. Smith. “Now, in this 21st century, the dynamic has changed.”
High-tech High
The Austin High class is an out-growth of a similar course developed by professors Roger Boston and Lifang Tien of Houston Community College Southeast. Last spring, the two educators used an innovative projects grant to pilot a class structure based on using iPhones as a platform for lesson distribution and inter-student community building. The experiment took off, and Boston and Tien have since been traveling far and wide spreading the word.
“The world has changed from 10 years ago, even five years ago. Everything is fast and mobile,” says Ms. Smith. “Teachers have to be flexible, genuine and creative in order grasp attention and achieve retention.”
Ms. Smith, who does double duty as an Computer Information Systems instructor at Austin High School in Houston ISD and an adjunct Computer Science professor at HCC Southeast,says she was tapped by Mr. Boston and Dean of Workforce Development Dr. Johnella Bradford to develop a mobile learning class that would work at the high school level. For the high school students, the HCC team decided to nix the iPhones and their pricey cellular service contracts for its thinner cousin, the iPod Touch, which contains nearly all the same features minus the phone.
Adapting Well
To help her students learn Microsoft Office applications, Ms. Smith created a series of instructional videos that were pre-loaded onto each student’s iPod Touch by HCC Southeast’s instructional technology department.
“I actually turned a room in my house into a kind of sound room where I would go really early in the morning before anybody got up,” says Ms. Smith. “[On the videos] I’d be saying ‘click this, do that;’ actually teaching the students through it.”
After a chance meeting with one of the Vice Presidents of the Cengage Corporation, a textbook developer at a professional conference,Ms. Smith persuaded the company to create iPod compatible versions of their own instructional videos to supplement the course. The students, a cream of the crop selection from hundreds of applicants, have embraced the new approach, which they described as more convenient, illustrative and allowing them more control as compared with the dead-tree standard.
“I prefer using this type of method because if you’re in a regular class, most of the time the teacher is trying to rush through the material just to get it over with. But if you’re using the iTouch, you pace yourself so you can understand things better,” says Estefani Fuentes, 17, a student in the class.
Despite the college level coursework and relatively brief summer class length, Ms. Smith says her students have behaved “marvelously” and adapted well to the non-traditional structure, with the vast majority of them scoring A’s and B’s on their assignments. The course will be continued and expanded this fall and spring.
“Out of all the dual-credit classes I’ve taught with this subject matter, this class this summer has done the best. And it has been because of the videos being able to reinforce their learning,” she said. “I haven’t written on the board one time.”
Source: http://southeast.hccs.edu/southeast/ipods-in-class-bring-curricula-within-reach