M-learning a hit for Howick students

Excited about mLearning: Howick teacher Nathan Kerr with two of his students.

A pioneering project looking at mobile devices and their impact on learning has led to a huge success for the students at Howick College in Auckland.

The school – in conjunction with Vodafone, Manzana, and Waikato University –  was selected by the MoE to undertake the M-Learning Capability (MLC) project.

Mobile learning, or mLearning, is a relatively new field of learning, which allows digital lessons to be ‘zapped’ into various mobile devices –  such as phones, PDAs, iPods, PSP and iPads – allowing students to learn anytime and anywhere.

The project findings show that it was a huge hit with the students, who enjoyed carrying their learning on their mobile devices.

Anytime access to subject content files on their devices also encouraged the students to regularly review the lessons.

The project was such a hit that students wanted mLearning across all their subjects.

A high level of leadership also ensured the project´s success.

One of the unique aspects of this pilot is that students used their own mobile devices instead of providing class sets of same mobile devices.

Howick educators and project directors Nathan Kerr and Robert Douglas say: “The students these days are not digital kids, the digital kids were in the 90s. The students today are mobile, and there’s a difference. Digital is the old way of thinking, mobile is the new way.”

The project findings have been reported as far away as Spain, where the Universidad Oberta de Catalunya recently voted the mLearning project in the top four educational projects in the world.