“One Text Once a Week”: Beginning the Story With Mobile Learning

Abstract

“One Text Once a Week”: Beginning the Story With Mobile Learning Teaching and Learning has been changing over the past years to include mobile spaces where study is about small bites of learning completed ‘on-the-go’ while the student is either mobile themselves or in a mobile environment.  This has coincided with new teaching and learning models like the ‘Flipped Classroom’ (Bergmann & Sams, 2012) where content is delivered before class and later student engagement focuses on the application of that content in practical activities.  This presentation details a project where, faced with lack of engagement with the pre-class work, the initial content was moved on to a text platform to better reach-out to the students.  This was done using ‘WhatsApp’ and ‘Messages’ apps to deliver weekly content to two different classes.  The research question was Can I Flip My Classroom Using Mobile Learning through ‘WhatsApp’ and ‘Messages’ and thus improve my practice”?  Both pieces of software were appropriate for the task but the size of the class had an impact on choices.  The methodology was constructivist grounded methodology and self-study to fully explore this environment and to focus on teachers-as-agents-of-change.  Three questions that emerged from this were first, how to move beyond simple delivery of content to engagement in construction of knowledge, second what that knowledge then looks like and what pedagogy would best support these interactions.    Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.