Mobile Learning

I bought an A4 digital notepad (from ALDI!) last year (for just
A$160), and it works very well indeed. It allows me to use normal A4
paper, store my notes on an SD card electronically as well as having a
paper backup. I’ve used it to draw directly into my PC, and it’s light
and inexpensive, a fraction of the cost of a Tablet PC (which I’ve seen
some people use for taking digital notes – hmmm, overkill, methinks).
When docked with a PC, I can even use it like a USB key/SD card reader,
to store or retrieve my own files on the external SD card.

Anyway, Genius have just released a new model of their digital notepads, the G-Note 7100. Digital notepads allow you to write on ordinary paper, but have your handwriting automatically recognised and converted into data later. Also, any diagrams you draw are faithfully reproduced as electronic copies and can be sent around as email, attached to discussion boards etc.

The tablets can also be used as a (non-pressure sensitive) digital tablet when attached to a PC, allowing direct handwriting input or hand drawing of diagrams using a pen, which is much easier and more accurate to wield than a mouse.

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This Associated Press article provides a good summation and some case studies on the increasingly common use of MP3 players as an educational tool:

“Lindleigh Whetstone wears headphones as she shoves clothes into the washing machine.

Her classmate, Stepheno Zollos, wears them as he shops for groceries. An onlooker might assume the teens are listening to the latest top 40 hit, but they’re really learning Spanish.

Whetstone, 18, and Zollos, 17, are students in Kathy O’Connor’s class at Tidewater Community College in Southeastern Virginia. O’Connor got an $11,000 grant from the school to lend her students iPods so they can practice their Spanish conversations anywhere — not just sitting in front of a computer.”

[Continue reading this article]

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Another free mobile mapping solution, this time from Nokia. From tomorrow (Saturday February 10th), their Smart2Go platform and service will provide mapping in over 150 countries and over 1000 cities with full support for turn-by-turn GPS satellite navigation. It will also show users Points of Interest (POI) in their area and provide routes to get them there.

What I particularly like about this solution (over, say, Google Maps for Mobiles or Microsoft Live! Maps) is that it’s a hybrid solution that minimises the cost of mobile downloads. As well as being downloadable directly to a mobile phone, map data from Tele-Atlas and Nav-Teq can also be downloaded to a PC and uploaded to the phone’s memory. Once in memory, no network connection or data plan is required for mapping, routing and navigation. This is an effective and elegant solution – although when I tried to use the PC-based MapLoader software, it did not appear to be configurable for traversing proxy servers (which will make it less practical to use in educational institutions, until this oversight is remedied).

The Smart2Go application will run on Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices initially, and will come pre-installed on all future NokiaN-Series mobile phones. For mobile devices equipped with GPS, there is an optional upgrade available at a small cost to turn the Smart2Go application into a full voice-guided GPS turn-by-turn navigation system.

I won’t be able to comment on the quality of the application or the maps until I get a chance to try them out (when the product launches tomorrow), but the hybrid solution used by Smart2Go, minimising downloads, could make this the most practical solution for educators interested in providing their students with low (or zero) cost electronic maps for location-based or situated learning.

[via: Darla Mack, AllAboutSymbian, Nokia Press Release]

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