Living in the 4th Screen

Exploring the use of mobile technology in education and life

Abilene University Embraces Mobile Technology in a Big Way

Acu_report


I have mentioned the iPhone initiative at Abilene University here and here, but it was in reference to something else and not the entire initiative the University has undertaken. In the Fall of 2008 Abilene University gave each of the incoming freshman an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The ACU website says the following:

Freshmen use their iPhones or iPod touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances. Applications from Apple's online App Store helped many teachers discover new ways of teaching their courses.

The University created a mobile portal called ACU Mobile. The portal allows students to connect to campus news and calendars, course documents, various forms of media, and serves as a pocket guide to local events, restaurants, and sporting events.

The University filed a report about it's findings during the 2008-2009 school year. The report mentions two students who began developing apps for the iPhone. It talks about professors who used podcasts to augment their classroom instruction. You can follow the link to read through the full report.

I like the approach ACU has taken. They standardized on a device and built a mobile portal to provide content that is optimized for the mobile device. I know there are pros and cons on device standardization but in my experience when you have the same device it removes a lot of barriers to wide scale adoption by your faculty and important stakeholders. As a teacher if I know all students can access my podcasts easily then I will invest the time in creating them. On the other hand if I have to spend my time helping kids access information via a number of different devices and entertain excuses as to why they could not get the information, then there is a chance I might not get involved in using the technology in the first place. Ease of use and access are key ingredients when undertaking a major technology initiative like ACU has.

Podcasting, iPadio, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Today I had the privilege of chaperoning a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with two other faculty members and 22 students. I have not been to the Met in almost 25 years, sad to say. For me it was a very moving experience. I plan to go back very soon with some of my own children.

While at the museum I took part in a conference call. The conference call involved a discussion around using cell phones in the classroom in general, and specifically about how ipadio can assist with that practice. Besides myself, the other people taking part in the conference call that was broadcast live via ipadio, were Giles Bryan and Mark Smith from ipadio (profile link here), and Benjamin Wilkoff, an Online Learning and Technology Resource Specialist with the Douglas County Schools in Colorado ( profile link here). It was an invigorating conversation as we talked about how to use ipadio in education. I spoke about how some of the teachers at my school have used ipadio in our world language classes to capture students speaking in the target language. For me ipadio is Podcasting made simple. As I said before in one of my posts, with ipadio, if you can talk you can Podcast. You can listen to today's conversation below.