Fiona Handley. CLT, University of Brighton.

Version 1.2

Using Mobile Devices in the ClassroomThe Basics

1 From smartphones to laptops and iPads to smartwatches - mobile technologies have an increasingly important role to play in student learning in the classroom.

What are mobile technologies?What are mobile technologies?

Smart phones, tablets, iPads, laptops and wearables such as Apple Watches are all mobile technologies that students might use. There are many good reasons to consider using them in your face-to-face sessions with students.

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Pedagogic Reasons To Use Mobile Technologies:

• Supporting active learning – using mobile devices well means that students are not just passive receivers of information

• Saving and re-using materials – using mobile devices can create and store content that can then be easily shared and reused, by you or the students

• Collaboration – students can work together through sharing devices, or using them to share materials with the group or class

• Supports students as producers – some activities using mobile devices can mean that students can contribute content and ideas to the session

• Analytics – some activities using mobile devices can also collect data which you help understand student engagement and learning

Part 1

What are mobile technologies?

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This is made easier because of:

• Familiarity – most students use some kind of mobile device and many will already be familiar with the skills covered in this guide

• Graduate attributes and employability – increasingly, employers are expecting graduates to be competent using mobile devices

This guide focusses on some very simple activities using students’ own mobile devices that require very little or no preparation. The aim is to give you some ideas and the confidence to put them into practice in the classroom.

Decisions about using mobile devices should be made as part of a blended approach to creating sessions. This is outlined in the University’s 6 Steps to Blended

Learning, which emphasizes the importance of identifying a learning objective, and then choosing, online, digitally enhanced or face-to-face activities to

achieve it.

Issues In Using Students’ Own Devices

1. “How do I know if students have a mobile device?” Most students have a mobile device that they can bring to a session. Send out a reminder to them to bring it before the session.

2. “Not all my students have a mobile device!” Get students to pair up or work in groups if not everyone has a device. Make it clear to students that sharing is key.

3. “My students are continually on their devices, but not for work!” Set some ground rules about how devices are to be used in sessions. You can tell students to turn devices off if they are being used inappropriately.

4. “What happens if a student asks me a question about the technology I don’t understand?” Probably the easiest way to deal with this is to open the question up to the class and see if anyone knows the answer. If the problem can’t be quickly sorted, pair the student up with someone with a working device. If you’re

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really worried about this scenario, see if you can get some support from your LTA.

2 This section gives you some simple tips to help you prepare for a session using mobile devices.

Getting ready

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If you have never used mobile devices in teaching before it can seem like a really big challenge. For your first attempts prepara-tion is key. The more prepared you and your students are, the smoother the introduction will go - you’ve made a good start in reading this guide!

Get familiar with the University of Brighton’s Switch It On policy. This encourages the use of mobile devices in the classroom, but outlines appropriate behavior.

Ideally, tell your students at the beginning of the module that you’ll be using devices and the kinds of activities you’ll be do-ing, and try to get a feel for how many have devices and how confident they are at using them. Before face-to-face sessions remind them to come along with their device if they have one.

There is a useful checklist in this article on using apps in your teaching.

For your first attempt...

1. Keep it simple and use just one technology in a short activity

2. Identify what you need to do, and what students need to do

3. Choose small group teaching rather than big lectures so you can trial the technology and the activity, and logistics such as how long it takes for students to get the device out and com-plete the activity

4. Have a plan B such as a web browser with completed searches ready on your computer, or writing post-it notes that can be collected

5. Prepare with your Learning Technologies Advisor (LTA) to find out what issue or questions you may face

Part 2

Getting ready

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This is an example of what your session plan may look like:

3 Finding ways of incorporating mobile devices into the classroom is a great way to create engaging learning activities.

Activities using mobile devices

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Web searchesOne of the easiest activities to do in class is to get students to use their mobile devices to do an internet search. Depending on the type of device they would probably use apps or software such as Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome, and then do a search.

This could be to:

• Help students to quickly get a feel for a new topic - who is in-terested in it? How important is it in the wider world?

• Initiate a discussion - rather than suggest topics to discuss or get students to provide some ideas, use the web for inspira-tion

• Encourage students to identify key web resources on a sub-ject - perhaps to distinguish between credible and less reli-able sources

• Help develop their academic skills through using appropriate search terms to arrive at the right website

• Think about media representation - use the internet profile of a subject as the start of the discussion

• Quickly access online information - ask one or two individuals to look something up and share with the class to contribute to a discussion

• Set web quests where students search online for the answers to questions

One useful way to think of more activities using web searches is to use your session preparation. Every time you use a web search, ask yourself “is this an activity that my students could do?”

Part 3

Activities using mobile devices

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The simplest way to share the information gathered in web searches is through discussion, as you would at the end of any group activity.

Key Points About Web Searches

1. No preparation is needed for web searches, but it is a good idea to quickly run the search yourself beforehand

2. If you get students to work in groups there will probably be enough devices in the room

3. If it all goes wrong - think about the learning objectives and how best to achieve them. It may be that having the search already loaded on your computer, or a few print outs to hand, solves the problem.

Taking photosCreating activities where students capture and share informa-tion is a great way of students contributing to their own learning. Taking photos on mobile devices is a simple first step towards this.

Photos can record information to refer back to or to share with the group. For example:

• To take pictures of presentation slides

• To record the results of activities such as mind mapping done on flip chart paper

• To capture images of group work to illustrate projects

• To help their peers demonstrate competencies

• To illustrate summaries of sessions

You may need to remind students about the Switch It On policy - in particular the need to get consent from people if you are tak-ing photos of them.

The easiest way of sharing photos in a session may be handing round a device. The simplest way to share an image digitally is to upload the image to an area on studentcentral. This is cov-ered in the Sharing section.

Key Points About Taking Photographs

1. Most students will be very familiar with taking photos using their devices

2. For most activities only a few devices for even a large class are needed

3. If it all goes wrong use your own device, or collect materials and photograph them later

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Sharing ideas, weblinks and photos Mobile devices make sharing information and ideas quickly much easier, and so support collaborative working. It can be the start of students creating their own learning resources.

The simplest way for students to share weblinks and photos with the whole class is through using the module area on stu-dentcentral. They will already have access, however you may need to set up a suitable area in advance for them to place ma-terials, such as a class blog activity or a discussion board, both of which work well in the Blackboard Mobile Learn app for ac-cess to studentcentral from a smartphone or tablet.

There are many other ways for students to share and even col-laborate with each other online during class. However these are slightly more complicated in terms of preparation for you and your students and may leave a bigger digital footprint.

You could for example use:

• An Edublogs blog post - our university blogging network, based on WordPress.

• Padlet - an impromptu web noticeboard which has a free ac-count option. The boards can be embedded in studentcentral.

• Twitter - a social media network (and accompanying app) for sharing links, photos and commentary; as long as you stick within 140 characters.

• Many apps also have a ‘share’ function

Adding photos to studentcentral from an iPad

1. In the a web browser on your device (Safari or Chrome) login to student central and go to your module. Find the area of your module where you would like to upload your photo.

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2. Under the Build Content menu select Item. We pick an item rather than a File or Image because an item will allow us to adjust the size of our image.

3. Type in a name for your Item and then click on the image button in the edit tools. If you are not seeing the image but-ton you may need to expand your tools using the button indi-cated in the screenshot below.

4. The image button will open up the image upload area in a new tab. Don’t worry it will still work! Click on Browse My Computer.

5. In the Insert/Edit Image window that comes up select Photo Library.

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6. Find the photo that you need in your camera roll.

7. Type in a description and a title for your image.

8. Now we need to alter the size of our image, because iPads (and iPhones) make very large images. Click on the Appear-ance tab in the window.

9. Delete the values in the dimensions fields (w x h) and enter “250” in the field for the shortest dimension. So a portrait im-age would be “250” in the first box and a landscape image would be “250” in the second box. Leave one box blank as the image will be resized in proportion to itself (as shown above).

10. Press Insert to commit your changes. This will take you back to the original tab.

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11. Back in the main window you will see that your image has been added.

12. If you need to edit the size of the image or any other aspect of it, press on the image once so that it is selected and then press on the image button in the edit tools again.

13. Press Submit (bottom-right or top-right) to save your changes.

4 Now that you have covered the basics this section will review what you have learned and help you decide how to advance your practice.

Overview and next steps

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Got it!This guide has focussed on some basic techniques to get students to use their own devices in sessions and suggested some activities that you can incorporate into your session plan-ning. This may be the first step to doing more advanced activities, or these may be all you need to add to your suite of teaching and learning techniques.

A simple way of developing these activities is thinking about how they fit into a Flipped Classroom approach, where students look at resources before the session, and then use their mobile devices in the face-to-face session on an activity. It may be that this activity then creates new materials that students can then use after the session.

Need more help?Contact your LTA and look out for mobile themed work-shops available for sign-up via the LOCO training site.

Further resourcesFind out more about Blended Learning and using mo-bile devices on the CLT website and Information Serv-ices pages.

eLearning Blog mobile posts: http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/elearning/tag/mobile/

Sharepoint Mobile page: http://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is/learningandteaching/Pages/Mobile/Mobile.aspx

Follow the #appswap tag on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23appswap

You have covered the University of Brigh-ton’s Digital Literacy on Using Mobile Tech-nologies and covered some aspects of the literacies on Keeping Legal and Implement-ing Blended Learning Effectively. For more information see the Digital Literacies web-site.

Part 4

Overview and next steps

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Accessibility TipsThese tips are for iOS and can be immensely useful for sup-port.

Turn on the Text-to-Speech settings on iOS. Allows you to se-lect text or a page and have it read aloud in your chosen voice.

Create your desired accessibility shortcut. Three taps on your home button can be set to provide a shortcut to your de-sired accessibility function such as: VoiceOver, Invert Colours, Greyscale, Zoom etc. Explained in the blog post linked to above.

Security tips• Always have a passcode/password on your device. The longer form

codes are more secure rather than 4 digits.

• Keep your Operating System up-to-date. Software updates contain se-curity patches to counteract potential threats.

• Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. If you want to use Find My iPad/iPhone then you need to leave this on, but you can control how your location is shared with other specific apps. This is really worth doing.

• Also in Settings > Privacy > Location Services at the bottom of your Location Services list you will see System Services. This is where you can turn off Location-Based Alerts and Location-Based iAds.

• Going back to the main Privacy area, you can choose whether you want to share you Diagnostics & Usage data with Apple and also whether you want to share that data with App Developers.

• Limit Ad Tracking: you can do this in Privacy > Advertising and then turn on Limit Ad Tracking. Also you can start with a clean slate by us-ing the Reset Advertising Identifier option.

For further information see the Security advice for mobile users guide at the Information Services website.

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© The University of Brighton 2017

Created by the Centre for Learning and Teaching and Information Services, University of BrightonVersion 1.2

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