Apps for learning at CPIT

Sam Hegarty our ‘star’ learning technology advisor and the library liaison team represented by Brian McElwaine and Meg Upjohn have been running a series of workshops at CPIT. One of the lunch time workshops centres around the use of apps for technology enhanced learning and the library’s session focused on using apps to find resources. All the sessions have been well attended.

Apps we introduce are mostly IOS but we have also started a list of apps that will run across all the various tablet platforms – IOS, Android and Windows 8. With BYOD, it is important we make things easy for tutors to use apps for learnable moments.

The main objective is to ensure that learning outcomes come up first and foremost in planning lesson sessions. With the maturity of iOS and tablet infiltration into classrooms across the education sector, a slew of blogs and sites recommend a large list of apps.Some with focuses on specific areas in educations like project-based learning, a list compiled through crowd sourcing, and higher education. There is also a good site that sorts apps into various categories like grade levels and learning purpose. 

As a way to filter through all the information a taxonomywheel (with iOS apps as examples) provides food for thought and a foundation for discussion during the session.

The apps presented include - in addition to ones noted previously include:

- Haiku deck – an alternative to keynote

- Coach’s eye (just over NZ$8.00) – annotation of videos

- Explain everything – similar to educreations but with a more mature user community spanning the school and higher education sectors.

Ones I have been playing with in the last few months include:

- Inspiration lite – mind mapping.

- Comic life (just over NZ$8.00)- used in our original mlearning / mportfolio projects using phones. This niffy app turns photos into cartoon strips. Insertion of speech bubbles etc. is intuitive and fun.

The library is moving into the use of QR codes. So introduced scan life for reading QR codes. The codes can be generated using Kaywa. Codes provide direct access to ebooks, emails to ask for more information or make suggestions and ease of access to websites with long urls.

The two readers recommended are Bluefire which is compatible with the ebook collections at CPIT library and overdrive for access to theChristchuch library’s extensive ebook collection. Both require membership accounts at each of the libraries to be able to access the e resources.

Learning from mlearning pilot participants

Nick Ford & I had an invigorating session with a group of apprentices who are part of our mlearning pilot. The session is an introduction to the apprentices who are keen to take part in the pilot on how to archive their evidence so that we can have access to their work.

All of the apprentices own a camera capable phone. Three are very conversant with phone capabilities and especially up to date with how to ‘work the system’. If you know how and when to do it, there are ways to access the web via your phone for very little payment!

Our advantage with our mlearning project, is that we are using a form of personal expression that is natural to our students. They find photo and video blogging to be a normal way for them to share their leisure activities with their friends. Half the students had their own webpage. Their perception of webpage layout & navigation is different from ours. They are not phased by a page with is cluttered with video clips, photos, advertisements, text snippets, multiply search boxes etc.

The introduction was also to familiarise the students with how to transfer their evidence or link to their evidence on to a Moodle page set up for each student. All the students are provided with ‘teacher’ access to their page. Almost all the students understood how to work Moodle very quickly and were linking to flickr, youtube and other websites (like their own Bebo page) within a few minutes of being shown how to work the editing icons. In fact, they picked up on the possibilities much faster than groups of tutors who would be given a similar introductory session to Moodle.

We also showed the students the possibilities in using Vox and Comic life to lay out their portfolios. Students familiar with Bebo appreciated the cleaner Vox interface and most thought that laying out their evidence in the form of a comic book would be something they would give a go.

It will be interesting at the beginning of next year to see what has eventuated with evidence collection and to see how the collation of the eportfolio will take place when the time comes for the evidence to be presented.

Starting on mLearning pilot

Nick Ford & I put in a joint application to the CPIT Foundation for funds to run the mLearning pilot. Our bid has been successful, so it is now time to put our pilot plans in place.

As a forerunner, the local paper did a write up about the project. The main goals of the pilot are to test out the various parts of our mlearning project with a cohort of first year apprentice bakers. It will be a bringing together of all the things we have learnt thus far with the various trials reported on this blog.

A couple of interesting items which I will explore in the next couple of weeks before adding into the pilot as possible eportfolio repository alternatives are:-

• Comic Life (via Thomas Cochrane’s blog that points to Joao Rivera’s blog on using comic life to chronicle boat building
• Mahara, the NZ open source eportfolio site and
• Slideshare, since a few apprentices have started to use powerpoint for their year three portfolios on gateaux / torten and breads.
  

It will be exciting times ahead!