Poodle: a course-management system for mobile phones

Japanese mobile phones contain small but standard Web browsers and email programs, and so can replace desktop computers for a variety of educational tasks. Mobile phones have the advantage of being easily usable at any time and any place, even in large lecture halls without desktop computers, and offer the possibility of exploiting time otherwise wasted in commuting. We believe that mobile phones offer our best chance at normalization: making (miniature) networked computers a standard part of every educational activity, rather than being offered only for certain activities in isolated, dedicated computer labs. A number of research projects have indeed shown the efficacy of educational applications of mobile phones, but creating such materials is still difficult. This paper proposes poodle, a course-management system designed to facilitate deploying educational materials to mobile phones. After reviewing moodle, and technologies for display on small screens, this paper presents our experience with poodle, showing how it supports ubiquitous polls, quizzes, wikis, forums, and flash cards. We believe poodle is an important step towards the normalization of mobile phones in education.