Electronic lessons on the go
Onehunga High School students sitting on the bus are like teenagers anywhere with idle minutes to kill – reaching for their cellphones and tapping away.
But here's their secret: the students are not texting their mates but studying notes from a fieldtrip.
They admitted as much to teacher Nathan Kerr who last year developed a way for students to create visual records of information, compress them and zap the file onto mobile devices as ever-ready study notes.
It's a teaching resource that is attracting attention. Otago Polytechnic has been in touch with Nathan and is considering providing information via mobile devices for some students, and businesses are looking at its potential as a marketing tool.
The geography, travel and social studies teacher also caught the attention of judges at the Microsoft Regional Innovative Teachers conference in Vietnam, where Nathan was named 2008 New Zealand Innovative Teacher of the Year; gaining entry to a worldwide forum later this year.
For all that, he has an unassuming air and speaks with enthusiasm and curiosity about developing the technology alongside his students.
"The most important thing to remember about the mobile teaching project is that it's student driven, they know a lot more about the type of technology than I do. It's a collaboration through and through," he says.
The idea came from students who said they'd heard computer files could be stored on cellphones. That got Nathan researching and tinkering, and updating his class who were surprised, then keen to see their teacher run with the idea.
"I was reporting back to the students and they were giving me homework for a while," he says.
Many students were interested in online information but did not have internet access in their homes. Mobile devices like cellphones filled the gap.
As in-the-hand storage devices, mobile phones function as a memory aid after term 1 field trips for students who need to retain learning for term 4 exams, Nathan says.
He gets students creating their own multi-media presentations using standard movie software; this is then compressed and transmitted to the cellphones from school computers.
Nathan found he could only transmit data to devices very close-by, but was not deterred, rigging up an antenna to boost the signal over five square kilometres.
"It keeps you busy, the old brain," he says and admits gingerly to the extra time he committed to the process.
"I was putting in about an extra 20 hours a week building this technology up, but it didn't feel that way because it was so exciting."
His class had loads of enthusiasm too, which quickly spread from the technology to their actual subject matter, giving feedback on the accuracy of facts in each other's movies, he says.
"There were heated arguments about geography; they were actually getting worked up over geography so I thought 'we're onto something here'."
And his contribution to teaching does not end there – Nathan is also a writer of units and support materials for the Ministry of Education and Film Archive's On Disk moving image resource (see previous article).
As for the mobile teaching project, Nathan says the technology that makes it possible has been around for most of a decade and students are fluent in its capabilities. Seeing its potential for teaching and learning was a case of tuning into their wavelength – "they will give you pointers if you listen carefully", he says.
Key contact
nkerr@ohs.school.nz