Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Hello all.

I'm involved in leading a Historical Association / Becta research project into the best use of mobile technologies in (initially) Key Stage 3 History education. We've got a team of very IT literate teachers, including one of this years Bett winners but I'm conscious of the fact that many of the participants are fairly new to making use of PDA's / Mobile phones in lessons. We're only just beginning our project formally and to date have simply gathered a range of ideas from interested participants and have looked through some of the existing research to identify areas that we believe will work most effectively in History education.

I've worked my way through almost all of the articles on this site now and have picked up some very good ideas as a result (thankyou!). If there are any Historians, or people interested in our project on this forum, I'd love to hear from you. Further details of what our aims / objectives are along with a rough overview of some of the participants initial ideas for using mobile technologies can be found on the HA message board at http://www.hamessageboards.org.uk/noticeboard/index.php?showtopic=50 A project overview is attached to this post. If anyone has any constructive comments about the types of things we're considering, or knows of something really obvious that we've missed out, please let me know.

Thanks.

Dan Moorhouse
Secondary Committee, The historical Association

GIS ideas and guidance would be much appreciated! I'm meeting with someone from Aegis about developing this sort of technology for Histoty teaches' usage on Friday, so any ideas and experiences in advance would be much appreciated!

That sounds brilliant. I've had discussions with i-learning about doing something similar for a site in Yorkshire - so I may well want to pick your brain at some point! Have you got a plan b in place for pupils who don't have EDA's? On our project we've deliberately gone for teachers who cover the 'tech spectrum' and whilst my pupils would be able to use this sort of technology, I know that many would be limited to making use of the camera, video and voicerecorder functions on their mobile phones. Other than combining a worksheet / map with instrctions to use the mobile phone, is there a good / feasible technology based solution for these pupils?

Hi Sue

Several of our project participants are based close to you. I'm sure that this will be of interest to them and it certainly is something that I think ould work really well. I'll be in touch soon.