T4E 2010 International Workshop on Technology for Education
Michal Yerushalmy
Mathematics Education & Technology
Department of Mathematics Education
The institute for Alternatives in Education
University of Haifa, Israel
Visiting Professor, IIIT-B, Bangalore, India
http://www.edu.haifa.ac.il/personal/michalyr/
The Math4Mobile project endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas, and increase the students’ commitment and creativity within the boundaries of the curriculum.
Although a part of the development is already widely used world-wide, the original impetus for the development was to study the socio-cultural aspects associated with a novel learning setting. In particular, we sought to define the new learning opportunities that are rapidly emerging from the unique features made available by mobile devices, and to reveal new patterns of learning that can respond to the demands and opportunities of the real world of schools.
Because currently the mobile phone is banned from the classroom in most schools, based on the assumption that it is a distraction for teaching and learning, we aim to find out what would make the mobile phone a deserving pedagogical tool.
The Math4Mobile environment includes content applications and tools. The first round of development produced applications mapped along various topics that are relatively well-known and useful for school math and also used as personal tools in doing mathematics. The applications are designed to take advantage of the general-purpose tools available on any phone and used for daily personal actions. In the second round of development we are concentrating on developing dedicated tools to support an augmentation of personal technology in a wider educational setting.
The project started as yet another cycle of development of existing tools and materials shaped by new technology, but it quickly became a substantially new challenge. Designing for the constraints of the new hardware and enablers has led to ideas and challenges that went beyond being a hardware question.
Although technology is present in schools today, it is a significant challenge to imagine, plan, and try out learning scenarios for the new learning environments.
The presentation offers scenarios designed for the elementary and the secondary schools regarding modeling physical situations, manipulating with applications that go beyond the regular use of graphing calculators, augmenting textbooks for encouraging interactive reading and supporting classroom interactions.
Download: Mobile Scenarios Presentation – PDF
