Future of mobile learning – internet capable mobile devices exampled by ipod touch

Back into the fray and taking a couple of hours out of working on my dissertation to catch up on news on the bloggersphere via bloglines.


Latest Horizon report out, both the international version and the Australasian version. Summaries by Derek Wenmouth, George Siemens and Jane Hart. All have mobile learning or mobile internet capable / cloud assisted learning as their top pick for mainstream adoption.

I have been playing with the ipod touch for several months and must say that the capabilities for using it as a learning tool are very good. However, due to its small screen size, it is very much a one person display device. Access to WiFi also an essential if the ipod touch usage is to be maximised in a classroom situation. Access to WiFi also preferable for distance learning students who use it as an access device to their LMS. The grand thing about the ipod touch is that it displays webpages without the need to tweak the display/style sheet settings of the actual webpages. The ability to enlarge and navigate around the page plus tap on the links with a finger are all intuitive and simple to use.

So far, I have barely been able to use the 32G on my ipod, I have at least 26G of space even though I have a few albums of songs, about 200 photos, over 100 documents (using a pdf reader) plus about 60 apps. I bought my daughter a 32G ipod touch for Christmas & she has already filled up all but about 5G!! She has 5000 songs on it, all transferred from her old ipods.

While away, I used the ipod touch extensively to read by blogline feeds and to keep an eye on the weather. Also to use it to make advance bookings for accommodation, onward travel and find information on places of interest. WiFi pretty easy to access in the urban centres of NZ but much more difficult to find (plus expensive) in smaller places. Especially the small towns around the central North Island (Turangi, Whakapapa) and the southern end of the South Island (Waikouaiti, Riverton, Tuatapere). However, once access found, things ran smoothly and 15 minutes of access would be sufficient for me to complete tasks required. Plus in December,  I updated my blog at the Ascilite conference mainly using the ipod touch. At home, my laptop only came out to work on my dissertation. All web surfing and games playing accomplished on the ipod touch. What did I use to do without the ipod touch?? drag out my laptop and wait 10 minutes while everything boot up by which time I have forgotten what I needed to find out or distracted by another task.

Back to apps, I have been exploring these over the last few weekends, mainly trawling through the lists using the iTunes shop search function. Lots of little apps for science (periodic tables), maths (drill programmes), word games plus usual reference tools for astronomy, botany etc. Probably the best application to date would be this one for sharing multiple choice questions with students who also have ipod touches. As apps profligate, will need to keep in touch with some of the bloggers who lists and review new eudcational apps. These include Tony Vincent, Chris Webb, wired educator and Kathy Schrock.

blogging with the ipod touch

Just did a quick tidy up of the blogs posted using my ipod touch during the ascilite conference.  Good access to WiFi in all the various rooms plus a good way to learn my way around the use of the ipod touch for text input.

In all, a quick way to take notes etc. as I was less distracted by web surfing the various presenters & sites as the presentation ran. Which is what happens when I attend conference sessions and blog sessions on my laptop as they happen.  The lack of capability to put in links easily is a hassle as it means I need to go back to the blogs when I am free to do a general tidy & update.  However, it does mean I do the requisite followup on the various papers.

The ipod touch text entry is easy to use, the 'p' does occasionally get lost as it required firm tapping to bring it up.  Moving between the text and the numeric keyboard came with a bit of practice.  So as long as there is good WiFi, I will consider just bringing the ipod touch to the next conference and leave the laptop at home.

ipod touch for enhancing student learning

The more I play with the ipod touch, the more I excited I am with its potential for enhancing student learning. There are many examples, mostly from the school sector to learn from. Last week, the local paper’s technology section featured the the ipod touch plus a cheap phone as an alternative to owning an iphone (cheapest option with $40 a month plan for 24 months comes to almost $2000) compared to under $400 for a ipod touch 8G & a couple of hundred $$ to purchase & run a phone.


As an alternative to using netbooks, the ipod touch is more suitable as individual student hardware. The smallness of the device means that doing group work on the ipod touch will be more difficult then with a netbook. Small groups of 2 or 3 will work though. However, maximising the use of the ipod touch must include the need for each student to have one and a robust wifi network to cope with multiple users all accessing the network at the same time.

Examples of the use of ipod touches in education are plentiful. Louise Duncan is one who has set up a good resource including a list of the apps she uses in class & a list of ipod touch tips from students.

Tony Vincent, always an great advocate for mobile learning provides a good overview of educational possibilities for the ipod touch including good tips & tricks.

Wired educator (Mr. Croy) has an Apple slant which covers all sectors of education and has good overview of the use of the ipod touch in education and examples from his students .

A good collection of resources for use of the ipod touch in education from Chris Webb. And a whole host of examples of using ipod touches in education from Classroom 2.0 a social network on Ning.

Apple also has a recently published (July 2009) official guide to educators for using the ipod touch. So lots of examples to distil, try out and evaluate. Plus to work out how best to make use of the ipod touches capabilities within a blended learning environment.

ipod touch and the MLE project

About a month a go, I picked up two ipod touches funded by the CPIT academic research committee. Renaissance computing, the agents for Apple in NZ kindly provided two ipod touches (an 8G & a 32G) for the price of one 8G :) So I have been busy over the last week or so having a play to evaluate the potential for it’s use with various mlearning projects. Being away much of October has provided time while travelling to work with the ipod touch and to utilise and evaluate its many capabilities.

Comprehensive information is provided on the apple site for using itunes, the main way to transfer information between PC and ipod without going online. Unfortunately, the ipod touch touch does not run with the mobile learning engine plug in for Moodle but accessing our normal Moodle using a web browser has always been an option.

Good starting point to the 1000s of ipod touch apps plus here is one which includes an app to turn your ipod touch into a remote control for itune PC! This one includes the app video piggy to download youtube videos.

I also downloaded stanza to convert ebooks to read on the ipod touch with a good guide from this site on how to read ebooks on the ipod touch.

From the education point of view, there is itunes u for courses, top tips on using the ipod touch for learning by Jonathan Nalder, a teacher from Queensland and a slideshare ppt providing examples of using ipod touches in learning.

The user interface for the ipod touch is intuitive to use, picture and sound quality also good. At just under NZ$400 for an 8G ipod touch, it is an accessible mobile alternative to a desktop or smartphone. The many apps available, many free and most at an affordable price provides an indication for the future role of software on mobile devices. Apps are also a cinch to download and although many are little ‘play’ apps, many provide useful utilities to enhance productivity at work and learning opportunities.

Only bugbear is no camera/video but the ipod touch does have a good voice recorder. The new ipod nano has a video camera so maybe a video camera is going to be in the next model of the ipod touch?