Mobile learning benefits students
Mobile learning can happen anywhere and at any time. Students can use mobile phones in a classroom, on a bus or in their dining rooms at home. Yet, the use of mobile technology in school doesn’t always guarantee student learning or academic success.
According to Dr. Martha Stone Wiske, “One of the enduring difficulties about technology and education is that a lot of people think about the technology first and the education later.” Dr. Wiske is the co-director of the Educational Technology Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In the 21st century, the concept of digital learning is still evolving. The educational system in most countries today is still more suited for the agrarian and industrial eras. Unfortunately, the world’s educational system is not keeping up with the ever-changing technological landscape in the work place.
Students should be preparing for new technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. Educators should be modifying their curriculums accordingly to help students prepare for the labor force and remain competitive in the future global economy.
Mobile learning can transform education and student learning in today’s classrooms. Students are acclimated to using new technologies in the global economy, when they acquire new skills through mobile learning.
Mobile technology that can increase student learning
- E-readers provide the most up-to-date information for students. They no longer have to study out-of-date information in textbooks that were published years ago. Facts, events, concepts and the latest problem-solving techniques keep them interested in learning new subjects.
- Individual mobile modules allow students to work at their own pace. Students can spend more studying and learning time for subject areas that are harder to master. These individual mobile modules are contained with educational apps and games accessed through individual student logins.
- Mobile technology connected to the cloud helps students transition from traditional classroom learning to studying anywhere. Student access to a mobile phone means that they can consume lessons at home or at other places outside of school.
- Text response programs for websites provide teachers with the capability to send text messages with homework assignments and/or test questions to students. Students can respond. This encourages a more interactive educational approach.
- Chatbots are at the forefront of innovations in educational technology. This software application offers speed and convenience. Simulating human interaction, this messaging style is conversational. Chatbots quickly and easily perform basic tasks using a simple series of messages or commands. Students love messaging platforms and spend a lot of time using them. Students, educators and parents can incorporate the use of chatbots in education. They are a convenient and easy to use productivity and efficiency tool.
How chatbots promote personalized education
Mobile phones cater to each student’s individual need. Educational content can be tailored to each student’s approach to understanding, learning and retention of school subjects. Around the world, students come from different backgrounds, have unique learning styles and a variety of interests. These pupils seek information any time of the day. They learn best when the material they are studying is relevant to their own interests. In most nations around the world, teachers must relate classroom lessons to a very diverse student body.
One benefit of using mobile devices in using education is their ability to provide individual learning instruction especially designed for each student around the clock. Mobile content is customized to meet the educational needs of each individual learner. Students can learn at their own pace and study subjects tailored to each student’s specialized interest. They can determine where to find online answers to basic questions using their mobile phones.
Studies demonstrate that students want to use mobile learning technology to help them master the subjects they study in school. They know about the new learning tools made possible by technological advances. Video games, online courses and virtual reality are all alternatives to traditional classroom instruction.
All of these educational alternatives are accessible to students through their own portable mobile phones. Mobile accelerates and compounds the impact technology makes upon student learning and achievement in school. Students are able to consume large amounts of information that are relevant to individual student interest in learning subjects that are meaningful to them.
Chatbots play a key role when it comes to personalized education. Students bring with them many different skills, interests and experiences. Different geographic areas, different fields of study and different levels of school communication make it difficult to reach individual student learning needs in a large and diverse student body.
Teachers can use chatbots as another educational resource to meet these diverse individual communication styles. For example, universities that offer courses in many different majors can use individualized chatbots adjusted to communicate with individual students from this diverse student body. Chatbot vocabularies and styles of communication can be programmed to meet the needs of 10-year-old or 40-year-old students.
Chatbots can act as tutors to tailor lectures and instructions that will fit each student’s individual need. One example is the partnership between the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, Facebook and a public school that uses chatbots to tailor lectures that address student learning weaknesses. This project incorporated the idea that chatbots act as virtual advisers adapting the school curriculum to the individual learning styles of each student. Students are able to learn at their own pace.
During the Summit Learning project, chatbots become vertical tutors. They engage in a dialogue with each student and determine the areas of learning weaknesses. Chatbots use this data to develop a personalized learning program focuses on helping students overcome areas where they are falling behind. Bots monitor student lessons, check student assumptions and help students with their individual lessons.
Learning with the aid of chatbots can happen outside of the traditional classroom. Bots can help students pass exams or improve English learning skills. As technology advances, chatbots will adapt to the diverse learning styles of individual students. Organizations will be able to customize the self-teaching bots to reach individual students and tailor learning to match individual learning styles.
Teachers can use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze student data for feedback on how to help students become proficient learners and perform better in school. Students can interact with chatbots through multiple choice or ranking questions. This provides excellent feedback to teachers on how to provide more information for the subject material students are having difficulty understanding or mastering in school.
Mobile learning and real-time assessment
There are many tools available for mobile phones that are good resources for educators. Real-time assessment can be embedded with mobile learning tools to free teachers from routine grading of class assignments and homework and provide immediate feedback for students.
Mobile app software helps teachers measure student performance. Detailed metrics showing how students learn, the process students use to acquire knowledge and how quickly they learn key concepts and skills are all tools available to teachers through mobile assessments. Using today’s mobile technology, teachers can develop dashboards that track classroom activities and the learning curve of individual students.
Students who fall behind in class often don’t get the extra attention they need to perform better in school. Others have mastered the current class material and need more challenging assignments to move on to more difficult subjects. These students are bored because they learn quickly and have to wait for the rest of the class to catch up with them.
The third group of students are in the middle of the first two groups and learn at the same pace as other students in their class. Teachers have to focus on teaching to the classroom average of their student body because that is where many of the students are in the learning process. Neither advanced students nor those requiring extra attention are well-served under the current status quo.
Teachers can use mobile learning chatbots to receive feedback from students. Instructional gaps are identified paving the way for teachers to improve classroom teaching methods to reach more students with the same information. Students can also receive feedback on their classroom performance for assignments, tests and other assessments. They will know what they need to do to improve their scholastic performance in class.
Hubert, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven chatbot is an example of an alternative to traditional online or printed forms for student feedback on academic achievement in school. The bot asks questions through student interactions. Some questions are how the course can be improved, what is working well, what is not and what should be changed. Hubert then analyzes student feedback, compiles the results and submits them to their teachers.
In order to save teachers time giving individual feedback on student essays, chatbots can help with automatic essay scoring. Many people believe there’s a good chance of replacing human feedback with artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Thousands of student essays could receive feedback after using a machine-learning algorithm to grade them.
In 2012, The Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition between essay grading systems. The winner presented a 0.81 correlation with human essay graders. Since then, researchers and scholars have been improving similar systems. One report claims to have achieved a 0.945 correlation using the same data as the Hewlett competition.
Teachers don’t have time to collect qualitative feedback from each student. A chatbot can collect opinions through a conversational interface. This takes less work than a real interview, but offers the same advantages. The conversation can be tailored to individual student responses and personality.
How mobile learning can add value to education
New learning initiatives such as incorporating mobile phones in the classroom offers many benefits. Teachers, students, tutors and peer groups are all connected through mobile learning devices. It provides new platforms for reaching millions of children and adolescents who are not enrolled in school. Students can use social networks to share information and knowledge.
Digital technology helps people think about new classroom models. Teachers can concentrate on more advanced problem-solving and building critical skills for their students. Learners become more responsible for their own education both in and outside the classroom. Both students and teachers benefit from incorporating the use of mobile technology into the instructional day.
Students are already using instant messaging platforms and social media. Tasks they are accustomed to using this media for are communicating with one another, researching information or locating the best assignment help. Students use these tools to enhance their learning process and increase their interest in mastering any given subject.
Instant messaging could be used by both teachers and students. This vehicle could connect them to classrooms, departments, various activity clubs and alumni groups. Students could easily find information about in class and homework assignments including due dates. They could also receive notification about other important events.
CourseQ is a chatbot created to foster communication between students, college groups and teachers. The college group uses it to broadcast messages and answer student inquiries. The students use it to ask class questions. Teachers use it to communicate with students, solve their doubts and ask questions.
Chatbots help solve the problem of over-crowded classrooms too full of students. Teachers aren’t able to give individualized attention to students who need it. Chatbots can fill the void and provide this individualized instruction to each student in need. Built in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) teach chatbots to adapt to each student’s needs and ability level. Chatbots conduct a natural dialogue with each student to determine whether the student is exceeding expectations or falling behind in class. With the aid of a chatbot, students can learn at their own pace.
Today, bots have become virtual teaching assistants performing the repetitive tasks teachers once did. Chatbots answer student queries about the course module, assignments, lesson plans and deadlines. Bots provide personalized feedback to each student after analyzing each student’s approach to learning. SnatchBot and other education chatbots are used by teachers to help them provide instructional content to students.
Benefits of mobile applications in education
The most effective way of enhanced interaction is to engage with children while they are using the mobile app educational software. This can activate better engagement between parents and children. Technology in the form of educational apps add a new approach to traditional methods of instruction. Apps enhance the learning process through fun and involvement through games, puzzles or other challenging tasks. Apps stimulate the brain to learn in a new and different way.
Mobile learning apps provide access to ebooks, pdfs and other online materials. According to studies, mobile apps promote entertainment. Learning becomes an active process. Children become more interested in what they are studying in school. Mobile applications are available to students 24/7. Mobile learning is relaxed and students can learn anywhere at their own pace. It’s not time-bound learning. Parents who choose to encourage their children to use mobile apps to learn new lessons during their free time are very smart. This is a guaranteed form of entertainment without wasting a child’s leisure time.
Apps and websites minimize the lack of interaction between students and teachers. These tools also encourage more interaction between the parents of students and their teachers. Mobile phones are portable and encourage systematic learning. Teachers and parents also benefit from using educational apps. Teachers can use apps that help them create their lesson plans. Parents can use mobile apps to track the progress of their children in school. Educational apps are the best way for students to stay connected with their teachers.
Piotr Wozniak is a Polish inventor. He developed a mobile learning app around the spacing effect of repeating old lessons when they have been almost forgotten. The app keeps track of what students learn and when they learn it by incorporating artificial intelligence into the app. The app can determine when a student is most likely to forget information. At that point, students are reminded to repeat the information they learned. It can take a couple of repetitions to make sure that students will retain what they are learning.
This method is a better alternative to the traditional approach most schools and universities take. In the traditional approach to learning, students cram as much as they can right before finals or before other major tests. A few weeks later after the exam, most students forget everything they have studied so hard for to pass their tests for a grade.
Is this really the objective of education? Or, wouldn’t it be better for a student to use an app that uses artificial intelligence to retain most of the information they have learned for future reference? Unfortunately, findings like the spacing effect have had a small impact on an educational system that is slow to adapt innovative technology.
mobile learning conclusion
Education faces many challenges for both educators and students. Mobile learning is emerging as one of the solutions. Accessing chatbots, other online tools and resources through mobile technology provides many options for personalized education. Students can work independently by themselves or in groups to solve problems and work on other projects of interest to them.
There already is a wide range of digital content available to students and teachers. This includes instructional games, augmented reality, interactive websites and personalized instruction through the use of chatbots. The result is that students have more control over what they are studying in school. Students can learn at their own pace and according to each individual mobile learning style.
Mobile learning has demonstrated that it does make a positive difference in how students learn. When used appropriately, mobile technology has the potential to help students succeed in their studies. They are able to process what they are learning and comprehend that acquired knowledge in school.
In an ideal world, every student would have his or her own mobile phone as a learning tool. They could use this tool both in school and at home. These devices would stay on task and help their owners become successful scholars.
Mobile technology is a way to transform mobile learning. It is a catalyst for creating impactful change in the current educational system. It is crucial to student development in the areas of critical-thinking and collaborative learning. These are skills that young people need in order to secure their place in the globally competitive economy.
However, the future of mobile learning is dependent upon the level of social acceptance it receives. Steve Jobs said that the problems facing education need more than technology to be fixed. Competent, engaged teachers are more necessary than ever in the Information Age. Balancing mobile educational advantages with healthy teaching interaction is the key to maximizing the worth of both.
More information about mobile learning.
Historical websites accessible with a mobile phone
National Museum of American History
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC
Mount Vernon in Alexandria, Virginia
National Women's History Alliance
History Today
History News Network
Colonial Williamsburg
