Handheld Devices

This article describes the creation of a fully online master's program for e-learning specialist training. This program is the first of its kind in Japan. As background information, Japan's general trends in e-learning are described, including activities of the e-Learning Consortium Japan and National Institute of Multimedia in Education. Such features of the master's program are then introduced as core and optional competencies for graduates, curriculum design, course design policy, and learning portal design. Since the core of the program is instructional design and the program deals with e-learning not only as the means of delivery but also as the content area of training, this online master's program may be considered unusual. Nevertheless, the lessons learned in this case and associated implications for other program development are important to others building similar online programs.

Case-study descriptions of secondary and middle school classrooms in diverse contexts provide examples of how teachers implement connected classroom technology to facilitate formative assessment in science instruction. Connected classroom technology refers to a networked system of handheld devices designed for classroom use. Teachers were surprised at the knowledge they gathered about student learning in connected classrooms. They recognized that their

Abstract: Teachers the world over are discovering the importance and benefits of incorporating popular culture into the music classroom. The cultural prevalence and the students' familiarity with recorded music, videos, games, and other increasingly accessible ...

Researchers from the University of Melbourne's New Technologies for Teaching Mathematics project created a lesson for the Year 10 students at their Victorian research schools. Two important goals of secondary school mathematics education are to build students' conceptual knowledge and to teach students to think mathematically. Mathematics education research supports the notion that seeing concepts represented in multiple ways both supports students' sense-making and enriches their learning. The design of lessons must be carefully considered in order not to create excessive cognitive load for the learner. The study focused on one 'lesson', designed to provide exemplars for lessons where new powerful, mathematically able integrated documents (Nspire) are used to support students' exploration of various representations of a given mathematical problem. Based on applications of quadratic functions, 'Marina's Fish Shop' was designed as a capstone lesson...

This paper discusses changes in young children’s learning performance and efficiency during clinical interviews in which each child interacted with a variety of virtual manipulative mathematics apps on iPads. Researchers interviewed 100 children ages 3 to 8 using a protocol format with two pre-assessment apps, four learning apps, and two post-assessment apps. Data were gathered quantitatively and qualitatively, using wall and screen-capture videos, pre and post assessments of performance, and time-stamping to record efficiency. Following 30-40 minute interviews where children interacted individually with the mathematics apps, results showed that children in the Preschool group increased efficiency while maintaining performance, children in the Kindergarten group increased performance while maintaining efficiency, and children in the Grade 2 group increased their performance and efficiency in skip counting, but not in place value. Overall, children in different age groups responded i...

This study explores the effectiveness of a game-based mobile learning model for children living in underdeveloped regions with significant contextual variations. Data for this study came from a total of 210 children between the ages of 6–14 years old from six marginalized communities in India. The findings reveal that children with little or no previous exposure to technology were able to not only figure out the given mobile learning technology, but also solve a series of incrementally challenging problems by playing math games without specific intervention or instruction by adults. The study also found that various factors, including gender and group size, do affect children's ability to adopt and learn while presenting a unique set of learning interaction patterns. This paper concludes with specific recommendations for future ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development) projects for educational development particularly targeting developing regions.• We implemented mobile math learning games in underserved communities in India. • We examine various patterns of mobile learning behaviors among underserved children. • Socioeconomic strata significantly influence technology adoption and learning pace. • Gender and group formation also affect children's ability to learn with technology.

These complex and at times contradictory judgments emerge from 1) an online survey of more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers drawn from the Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) communities; and 2) a series of online and offline focus groups with middle and high school teachers and some of their students. The study was designed to explore teachers’ views of the ways today’s digital environment is shaping the research and writing habits of middle and high school students. Building on the Pew Internet Project’s prior work about how people use the internet and, especially, the information-saturated digital lives of teens, this research looks at teachers’ experiences and observations about how the rise of digital material affects the research skills of today’s students.

In recent years, we have witnessed the concomitant rise of communicative and contextualized approaches as well as the paradigmatic development of the mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) framework in analysing language learning. The focus of MALL research has gradually shifted from content-based (delivery of learning content through mobile devices) to design-oriented (authentic and/or social mobile learning activities) study. In this paper, we present two novel case studies of MALL that emphasize learner-created content. In learning English prepositions and Chinese idioms, respectively, the primary school students used the mobile devices assigned to them on a one-to-one basis to take photos in real-life contexts so as to construct sentences with the newly acquired prepositions or idioms. Subsequently, the learners were voraciously engaged in classroom or online discussion of their semantic constructions, thereby enhancing their understanding of the proper usage of the prepositions or idioms. This work shows the potential of transforming language learning into an authentic seamless learning experience.

Recent technological advances have greatly improved the performance and features of embedded systems. With the number of just mobile devices now reaching nearly equal to the population of Earth, embedded systems have truly become ubiquitous. These trends, however, have also made the task of managing their power consumption extremely challenging. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to address this issue. In this  paper, we survey the techniques for managing power consumption of embedded systems. We discuss the need of power management and provide a classification of the techniques on several important parameters to highlight their similarities and differences. This paper is intended to help the researchers and application-developers in gaining insights into the working of power management techniques and designing even more efficient high-performance embedded systems of tomorrow.

Chinese classrooms, whether on school grounds or online, have long suffered from a lack of interactivity. Many online classes simply provide recorded instructor lectures, which only reinforces the negative effects of passive nonparticipatory learning. At Shanghai Jiaotong University, researchers and developers actively seek technologic interventions that can greatly increase interactivity in large blended classes. They developed a cutting-edge mobile learning system that can deliver live broadcasts of real-time classroom teaching to students with mobile devices. Their system allows students to customise means of content-reception based on when and where they tune into the broadcast. The system also supports short text messaging and instant polls. Through these venues, students can ask questions and make suggestions in real time, and the instructor can address them immediately. This article describes this system in detail, and also reports results from a formal implementation of the system in a blended English classroom of 1000 students (with about 800 being online). As the data reveal, m-learning activities can much better engage students in the learning process. Students in this class changed from passive learners to truly engaged learners who are behaviourally, intellectually and emotionally involved in their learning tasks.

This study examines how conversing with passengers in a vehicle differs from conversing on a cell phone while driving. We compared how well drivers were able to deal with the demands of driving when conversing on a cell phone, conversing with a passenger, and when driving without any distraction. In the conversation conditions, participants were instructed to converse with a friend about past experiences in which their life was threatened. The results show that the number of driving errors was highest in the cell phone condition; in passenger conversations more references were made to traffic, and the production rate of the driver and the complexity of speech of both interlocutors dropped in response to an increase in the demand of the traffic. The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving co...

ABSTRACT Cell phones have been banned in 69% of today’s classrooms (CommonSense, 2010). Reasons for the banning of cell phones may seem obvious—kids will misuse them to cheat, use textese in place of Standard English, cyberbully, and sexting (Brady & Conn, 2006; Johnson, 2004; Obringer & Coffey, 2007). These fears have disregarded the fact that today’s cell phones are inexpensive, mobile computing devices with a number of applications (assessments, digital images, podcasting, and internet access) that could be beneficial in the classroom. The bonus to these applications found on cell phones is that the majority of teenagers already own one and are efficient in their use. The question is, should the fears of the misuse of cell phones and the technology they provide prevent teachers from tapping into the many opportunities and benefits that cell phone use in the classroom might provide? This paper explores the current research to refute the claim that cell phones are responsible for aberrant behaviors and to explore the potential instructional benefits of cell phones in the classroom.

Interactive television (iTV) is a new media technology that has great potential for supporting second language learning, particularly for independent adult learners. It has many characteristics demanded by modern second language (L2) learning theories and is technologically quite sophisticated. However, in order for it to succeed it needs to fit in with these learners' approaches to media use in language learning. While there is an extensive literature on many other aspects of language learning and teaching, particularly in classroom settings, we know surprisingly little about the independent adult language learner's attitudes and approaches to learning and to technologies for supporting it. In this paper, we describe a project to develop language learning via interactive television (iTV) where a focus group study has been used to elicit the attitudes of potential users in order to direct the design process using a use-case scenario. We present the design implications that e...