II-Self-Assessment

Blog #5: Independent Inquiry Self-Assessment

One of the major challenges I encountered during my inquiry was a lack of consistency in terms of terminology and the technology being used in the field. This is a real issue that is facing professionals that are working to increase acceptance of a cutting-edge approach to learning. It was also an issue that created a great deal of confusion for me throughout the course of my research. As a solution, perhaps to the detriment of my argument, I tended to rely heavily on sources that seemed to share similar visions and ways of discussing the topic. My decision to reduce the scope of my inquiry in order to avoid confusion may have resulted in a perspective that seems to ignore certain elements of mobile learning, but I chose instead to include only information that I found personally relevant. Unfortunately, I made some assumptions about the transferability of terminology and concepts, but the scarcity of consistency in the body of research I consulted made this necessary. In some cases, I consulted research that concerned a function of a certain mobile learning device (especially PDAs) to support my arguments for other technology that serves the same purpose with the same framework or software.
At the beginning of my inquiry, I envisioned discussing the benefits of a greater variety of tools.
Ultimately, I settled on discussing only mobile phones and the iPod Touch. I was determined to discuss cell phone use because it seems natural to try to capitalize on the fact that students so frequently own their own cell phones. I remember sitting in on a PD day during my first practicum where the school was discussing purchasing personal response systems and thinking that it was misguided to invest hundreds of dollars in a technology that is so inflexible. Cell phones and iPod Touches are so much more versatile and engaging, and they are the students’ devices of choice. I must concede that the best case scenario for mobile learning is a laptop computer but these are affordable options that should be considered.
My perspective on technology has changed over the course of my inquiry during semester 4. I’m not sure if you would disagree with me Dr. J, but in many cases the use of technology is in itself a learning experience if it is properly supported by the teacher. Text message poetry is a great example. It goes without saying that text message poetry is not something you would do often with a class, but what a great way to talk about how language changes and to talk in a novel way about creative choice in poetry. Anytime you are creating a text you must consider your audience, and the experience of your audience is influenced by screen size of the intended device so again, critical consideration of creative choice is necessary when creating representations on mobile devices. This may not justify all uses of technology, but in ELA there is enough room for these technologies and I believe students would benefit from the experience.
I did not have the opportunity to really experience using the technologies I was writing about during my practicum, but I did interview my semester 3 partner teacher Mr. K who got funding for a class set of iPod Touchs. This was helpful in the sense that it reinforced my belief that the iPod can be incorporated into the classroom. Mr. K is planning to use the iPods word processing capabilities for personal responses, blog posts, and other short written documents. During my inquiry the interface was one of the greatest concerns with the use of PDAs that students repeated in the literature, but the iPod Touch’s keyboard is very intuitive and fairly large. It will be interesting to hear how Mr. K’s students enjoy using the iPods.