Hello Helen and Bassam,

Good evening to you both.

In a previous question posted by you, Helen, I had stated that students who use mobile devices on campus do not necessarily, and more like than not, use them for pedagogical purposes. From personal observation, students are on every social site that might exist. This is perhaps the main reason why a good number of our higher education (HE) students do not have the required creative, critical and complex cognitive skills to function in such an environment with efficacy.

Just like Bassam, I do not allow students with mobile devices in my class, even though my University still employs the traditional face to face (F2F) instructional delivery mode. If I do allow them, they must have them on silent, and they must not be disturbed by it. They are in the class to focus, and to learn, and focus and learn they will.

Warm Wishes,

Kerwin.

Though mobile devices are not allowed in the classroom at all.... But if for any reason student is found to use the mobile device then in 99% cases they uses the application like "FACEBOOK" or "HANGOUTS". and mobile devices of such students is forfeited.....

mobile Devices are allowed in class at our faculty since we do not like to provide students with printout Scripts. They are given the slides as PDFs with only few written comments. In Class they directly annotate the PDF with their tablets. Especially the brand with the pen included is very popular in these cases. Furthermore some do annotations with typing which makes noise and isn't wanted.

If I look during lectures what they do we can see that 90% work with the Topic, but some do some Facebook or other stuff not related to class.

In my Opinion class and lecture should be done in a way to motivate students not to use tablets off topic.

I noticed something difficult sometimes, that students lookup phrases and facts to control the lecturer and in very rare cases they start a discussion if they find something different on the Internet. In this cases it depends on the teacher how to handle that. Some don't like, some even like these type of discussion. If you can handle it, it can be a enrichment, because just quoting Wikipedia or Yellow Press Articles will stop immediately if you ask for the source. Then you can change on the level of metacognition to ask if we really want to discuss these topics in this way.

Teachers allowing Internet in class are much more well prepared to avoid being corrected by their students that the facts are already changed by latest research. They double check their material and are usually better informed about the latest review on literature.

Yours, Helmut

Hi Bassam, which technologies are you using in the classroom?

I've done focus groups with students and they seem to use their mobile devices to annotate slides and as you say Helmut, to look up things they don't know. I'm interested to see how widespread this sort of use is. I'm also interested to find out teacher/lecturer attitudes to mobile devices in class. At my university there is no universal approach: some lecturers allow mobile devices and some don't.

there's a new apprpoach at our university to use mobile device to interact with student in an anynomous way - use it as an audience response system.

we already use a TED System with a device given to the students but nowadays we expect all students to come already with a mobile device. The same company offers "responseware" wich can be installed on all kind of devices needing a licence for the teacher how many devices at the same time may be allowed to lock in at the same time. So you might end up with 30 licences for one class and teacher.

Literature shows some very promising results if used properly:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22578049

I guess there will be a lot of open source literature at google scholar if you look for

"effects of audience response systems on learning outcomes in education" if you do not really need specific answers for medical students.

Yours,

HA