This new paper describes how Australian teachers are using the iPhone and iPod Touch to A. assist them as Educators, and B. to enhance learning. As such, it presents a vital survey of apps and ideas to be shared with other teachers also beginning to use this platform. Thanks to the included Teachers for their keen responses.
6 Educators Talk About iPhone Use High Qual
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Kudos to my team.. Awarded the training top 125 again.
With wireless voice sales margins dwindling industry-wide, Alltel launched a big push in late 2007 to increase the company's data services revenue. "At the time, the wireless industry as a whole was no longer making much money on voice, so our sales efforts became heavily focused on data products and services, which were deemed the next big purchasing area for consumers," says Mindy Lane, Alltel's VP of training.
As part of this push, Alltel began selling data cards, which provide wireless connectivity to laptops from any area with Alltel Network coverage. Almost immediately, however, Alltel began fielding complaints about the cards, and found that many cards were being returned by consumers.
Concerned about the lack of data card sales and the number of subscribers leaving or switching to other carriers, the Alltel product marketing department assembled a task force to tackle the problem. The task force's needs analysis, says Lane, determined that most of the churn the company was experiencing was attributable to customer dissatisfaction or confusion.
"Among customers, we identified a number of misconceptions regarding what data cards were and what they could do. We also found that our sales reps and managers had misconceptions of their own. Many reps, for example, were selling data cards as �DSL replacements.' While that's true in most instances, a data card's ability to function as a DSL replacement depends on where the consumer is located and whether there are gaps or holes in wireless coverage in that area. Because a consumer's location also affects speed, we also received complaints from those who told us their DSL connection was faster than their data card."
To stem the tide of disaffected subscribers, Alltel reps were encouraged to do a "deeper dive" with each customer and ask more relevant questions during the buying process. "They needed to do a more in-depth job of finding out where the data card would be used, explaining the speed capabilities of data cards, and walking customers through the set-up and troubleshooting process," says Lane.
To arm reps with this knowledge, the Alltel training department developed a comprehensive training program to assist front-line reps in selling and supporting data cards. The program included computer-based training (CBT), as well as supervisor-led training on how to qualify and sell data cards to customers, questions to ask, what to listen for, and how to ask for the sale.
As a result of the training, Alltel channels experienced a 63 percent lift in data card sales and a 39 percent decrease in subscriber falloff from November 2007 to May 2008.
Interested in developing a training program to support a mission-critical product launch? Here are Alltel's tips for success:
� Tailor to your audience. Using Flash, Alltel's in-house training team developed a full-scale CBT simulation that taught sales reps and their managers how to work with data card customers more effectively. "Going through traditional training on a complex product such as wireless Internet cards would have been far too technical and boring for our sales force," says Lane. By creating an engaging, interactive simulation, she says, Alltel was able to draw learners in and grab their attention. "Sims are expensive and time-consuming to develop, and they are not the right solution for every need," says Lane, "but they are often a perfect choice when teaching workers about complex products, particularly when your audience consists of younger workers who are tech-savvy and appreciate interactivity in their learning."
� Reinforce. After going through the simulation, Alltel sales reps attended comprehensive face-to-face training that was conducted by their supervisors. In addition to reinforcing material covered during the simulation, the supervisor-led training provided a "perfect platform," says Lane, for supervisors to reinforce the data card product line's importance to Alltel's balance sheet. "We honed in on clarifying the basic value proposition of data cards, and on explaining what our churn rates were and how they were impacting us."
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I've always been a proponent of Blackberries in the mLearning world because I feel it is the choice device of 'road warriors' who would need an mLearning tool. Now, online schools are targeting the Blackberry for courses.
What if someone told you that you can earn a degree from your Blackberry? What if they said that you can study anywhere and anytime to fit it in with your schedule?
With this July�s updates, it will be much easier to take online classes on the go. Google plans to release software to make its email and calendar services work for the Blackberry. Google Apps Connector will allow users to access Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Contacts using built-in applications. It also connects to the Google Apps servers and synchronizes email, calendar and contacts.
Why is this helpful for online learners?
Read the rest here..
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E-Learning for me, does not just mean developing applications and websites, no it also means creating a system or dare I use that cliched word solutions to allow teachers to get more out of a session than what they put in.
Over the last year or so I together with Impact have been developing a system that will enable our catering staff to record teaching & training sessions.
First a little information, we've got two kitchens on site Ora & Skills; Ora is a kitchen where students cook lunch and dinner for staff and members of the public, Skills is a demonstration kitchen where students learn new techniques. Each kitchen has two PTZ (pan tilt zoom) cameras, three ip56 rated televisions, a touch panel and a control lanyard each. The system is quick to boot up, easy to log in and simple to use to ensure that there is minimum disruption to any session. Once the Chef has logged on he can use the lanyard to command the entire system from anywhere in the kitchens, without having to interact with the touch panel. As soon as the videos are recorded they are transferred to our servers and (pending approval) are viewable by all staff and students. So we've created a system that records chefs, this in itself is nothing new, we've had the ability to use video cameras in class for years; where's the benefit to the learners and most of all the teachers?
Monday evening was eventful to say the least; there I was happily watching a movie when the lights start to flicker, �oh� I thought to myself �a small power surge�.The latter was true, the former distinctly not.
I�ve got an energy monitor that displays your current (badum tish) energy consumption, my normal evening power draw is circa 200-300 watts, when the surge hit it spiked to well over 1.4kw, it continued to spike in this manner for over 20 minutes. Even though all my electronic equipment is on surge protectors, I still ran to the circuit breaker to kill the power and then proceeded outside to see how it was affecting the rest of the street. The power surge eventually changed to an all out power cut and with that Honiton road was cast back to the literal dark ages. So grabbing some candles, I wondered round the house checking things out to make sure nothing was on fire, I then I smelled oh so familiar smell of burnt electrical wires and equipment. However with no power I couldn�t check to see if anything was broken, so I went to bed.
On waking the next morning I hustled downstairs and flipped the circuit breaker back on and nothing happened, no lights, nothing.
There was no power, I was cut off.
Now alongside the usual inconveniences of no kettle, hot water or being unable to cook food, I had no internet.
Big deal right? Wrong
Humans are creatures of habit as am I, before walking to work my routine is this Shower, get dressed and then Whilst making and eating breakfast (via laptop or iPod touch):
* Review twitter feeds and respond
* Read/write personal and work email s
* Check news, games and other websites
* Download podcasts & other content for the day
* View e-learning blogs for new content
* Check up on current Chess games
So by the time I walk to work I�m:
* Fully informed of current happenings in the world (useful for generating student polls),
* Have a reasonable idea of what awaits me at my desk (ensures I can hit the ground running)
* Have responded to any mission critical emails (Quality of service is important)
* Already musing about blog posts based on websites I visited that morning
In short I am a more effective employee with the internet at my disposal; I can respond to things quickly, ensuring that if something has gone wrong, by the time I arrive at work, I already know about it and can get on with sorting out.
But not on Tuesday morning (I don�t have an iPhone as of yet, so I had no external internet connection).
I then realised that my entire online life is based in the Cloud: Google apps, Gmail, Flkr, Twitter, Facebook etc. Nothing resides on my local machine, all the data and content is stored on some data centre and processed on a web server. My machine, be it laptop, pc or iPod only presents that data to me, nothing more. Of course I have some applications installed on my netbook but it is no where near the amount it used to be. If you think about it, you can pretty much do everything you would traditionally use a locally installed application online.
Word processing, Calendars, Spreadsheets are well served by Google apps, photo editing by Flkr, you don�t even have to have a printer in your house as you can use an online printing service that delivers direct to your door.
The only application you need to facilitate this is a web browser, nothing more.
Cloud computing is the future (although one could argue that it�s actually a return to the Mainframe and Dumb terminal relationship from the 1980�s), the device is becoming almost an irrelevance, merely a point of access that enables you to connect to your application and services held on the internet.
The cloud is the future; it�s the next logical step in the evolution of both the PC and the internet, but my experience on Tuesday morning leads me to think it can never replace traditional application access methods until internet access is universal.
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(From Thomas)
Hello, I'm Thomas Curtis and this is a little about me and a mini blog post combined.
I'm an e-learning developer at South East Essex College a FE/HE institution located in Essex, United Kingdom
I've worked at a range of Colleges and Academies, all of which pursue e-learning & ICT as a medium to enhance and support the learner experience. My education was interesting to say the least, I barely graduated from School as I had become disaffected with the learning experience, the traditional teaching methods used at that time and struggled with both the learning difficulties of Dyslexia and Dyspraxia.
It was not until I went to College (ironically it is the same institution that I work for now) that reignited both my passion for learning and computing in general. Through hard work & the support of lecturers I managed to secure both a recognised computing qualification, acceptance on a university degree and without sounding too melodramatic forge a new path for myself. I also feel having studied at the same College where I initially studied gives me a unique perspective, enabling me to see both sides of the coin so to speak.
As e-learning & the Internet itself was just getting started as a learning medium when I studied at the College (99-01), teachers and students were just getting used to the Internet as a resource let alone a method to evolve learning. It was as a result of my personal experiences as a student that I decided that once I had completed my Degree that I would try and return to the education sector to 'give something back' for lack of a better cliche, as I had personally benefited from the range of e-learning tools which enabled me to attain a level of education I had initially dismissed as an irrelevance, if not an impossibility.
From the abacus to the mobile phone, technology has always been used with varying degrees of success, at College & University I was introduced to the benefits of word processing, mind mapping, spell check, font and colour manipulation to improve readability and a whole host of other resources and techniques. The tools on offer to today's learner far, far exceed anything I could have dreamed of, case in point; teachers can communicate with Students in an instant, show multiple videos on a interactive whiteboard without having to wheel in a 28 inch CRT, via mobile technology we are providing students with the ability to send/receive course content from anywhere that can connect to the Internet, be that the gym, on holiday or even in bed (now that's personalised learning)!
Enough about history, I should talk about the present, what I do and where I hope to go from here.
In my role as an e-learning professional I develop applications & solutions to support teaching and learning (based primarily on Microsoft ASP.net and related technologies), this can range from simple web forms, event management systems to project managing multimedia recording solutions and full upgrade to lecture theaters. I also Blog about ICT and Twitter with other e-learning colleagues, both inside and out of College about e-learning, what it is and how it can benefit students and teachers.
The future..
I hope to continue blogging and establishing contacts with e-learning providers across the world, one thing that hinders e-learning is standardisation. From playschool, to Junior, to high school to university we all have differing systems, schemas, teaching methods and datasources. We do not teach in English Junior school and then switch to French from College onwards, so why do we do the same when it comes to e-learning? Moodle, BlackBoard, Bespoke software, some training, no training.
E-learning is supposed to make things easier for the learner, so why do we change the game at each step? It is this that I hope to change, perhaps open source is the key, perhaps not either way I'm looking forward to finding out.
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OK, I took the plunge, I am finally on Twitter @MobileLearn.
I need your help. What are the best ways to use Twitter? Are there good ways to link posts and threads from blogs or Facebook there and vice versa? Any best practices, hints or ideas for how to use it?
Your feedback would be great.
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Friday, April 24, 2009
KILGORE � Some high school students might have more than textbooks to lug to class next year.
School officials in the district of 3,700 students are launching iLearn, a new program aimed at incorporating iPods with daily educational instruction.
Director of Technology Mark Lane said Thursday that teachers will upload curriculum, lectures, study plans and homework assignments to computers at the high school. Students will then download the lessons onto an iPod Touch, where it can be completed at home or on the go. "We plan to start out with 60 iPods and introduce the program to our math and science classes at the high school. Later in the year, we will introduce it to our English and social studies classes," Lane said. "By the start of the 2010-11 school year, we hope to have the program started at the middle school and phase it into our other campuses each new school year. The goal is to provide every single student in Kilgore ISD with an iPod." he said. Lane said the school district estimates it will cost $135,000 to operate the program. He said about $95,000 will come from the school district, while the newly chartered education foundation has pledged funds for the remainder of the project to upgrade and integrate software at the high school, to purchase iPods and to send teachers to training for the project. Lane said the goal of the program is to give students another resource to grasp educational concepts that some find difficult learning during traditional school instruction. He said school officials hope the new program will raise test scores and overall student achievement. Kilgore won't be the first East Texas district to use the handheld electronic devices in school. Hallsville High School students participate in a similar program using iPod Nanos and iPod Touches. Toni Erickson, assistant technology director for Hallsville schools, said the program has been successful. "We have added 450 new iPod Touches this year at the high school for math and science classes to continue the program," Erickson said. "So far, so good for us." Lane is hoping Kilgore schools will experience the same success. "The community has been so supportive of this project," Lane said. "I think our residents and businesses realize that our economy is changing, and we must prepare our students for it."
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(Guest post by Jonathan Nalder)
I�m not a fan of Amazon�s Kindle eBook Reader. Not only is it not available in my country, but I feel the days of paying over US$350 for a device that only does one thing are long gone. Having said that, as en educator and former libary worker, I can see several direct eduational applications, especially with the just announced Kindle 2 having the ability to read out its content. Read a detailed overview via Appleinsider.
Why I�m writing about it however is more because of what the Kindle 2�s other features don�t do - they don�t sync with a PC or laptop. Just as Google�s Android mobile operating system gets all its contact and calendar data directly from the cloud, so too does the Kindle 2 interface via 3G connection only with a home eBook site, or with other Kindle eReaders. This is the future of mobile, wireless devices and why they are leading towards a true ubiquitous, everware future. Even small mobile devices now have the ability to connect wirelessly to all the information etc they need to be fully functioning.
Are education departments setting up such networks to unleash the power of having this kind of computing available 24/7 from any location?
You can read more posts on emerging mLearning devices ad ubiquitous learning at Jonathan Nalder's 'uLearning' blog.
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Important Note: As you may know, Flash Lite does not parse XML directly. This may seem like a road block to creating an RSS reader, but it really is an easy obstacle to leap.
The first thing we�ll need to do is parse the XML feed and change it as to be loaded by Flash Lite. This is written in PHP, however, this could also be easily reproduced in Pearl, JSP, or with many other scripts.
First, define the link to the RSS feed:
$link_to_rss_feed ="http://mlearningworld.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default";
The link above will be the input of the simplexml_load_file PHP 5 function call as described below:
$xml = simplexml_load_file($link_to_rss_feed);
The $xml variable will now contain the entire XML feed from the above link. Notice that the above function can access XML content directly from the Internet, but it is subject to security restriction of your PHP server engine (visit www.php.net for more details).
At this point you are interested in parsing each <item> node and selecting the content of <title> and <description> to be returned to the Flash Lite 1.1 application. For this reason you use the foreach function to loop each node and extract the content.
First you need to strip out HTML tags from the text contained in the <title> and <description> tags. Do this by using the strip_tags function. Flash Lite 1.1 dynamic text does not support HTML tags.
Also�and this is very important�you must strip out any & symbol contained in the text enclosed in the <title> and <description> tags. You do this using the str_replace function. Flash Lite 1.1 recognizes variable data loaded by having a & symbol as the prefix, so any & contained in the text will break this data structure.
The following two lines will create the & name/value pair data structure for the title and description, which will be the variables used in the Flash Lite 1.1 RSS reader:
echo "&title$i=".$title;
echo "&description$i=".$description;
The above echo will return the following output for the first <item> block:
&title1=Tips for Developing a Flash Lite player&description1=New article on developing a Flash Lite player.
Because an RSS feed contains more item nodes, you will end up having several &title and &description data, such as &item1, &description1, &item2, &description2, and so on. Append the loop index $i to each item and description variable to create a different set of each node.
The &totalitems is the total number of items parsed and the &end variable is the flag that we will use to indicate to Flash Lite 1.1 that the data is over.
Flash Lite 1.1 does not have the capability to check for the end of data. So the solution to this problem is to return a flag at the end of the data.
Note: You can use other methods to achieve the same results. Also keep in mind that you will probably need more error checking.
At this point, you have built the main structure of the server RSS parser. Place the file on your server that is accessible from the Internet. To test the parser, just enter the link to the script into a browser.
Next week, we�ll explore building the player in Flash Lite for your mobile device. After that, we�ll discuss a strategy to choose what content to push out and when. Keep watching.
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mLearnopedia.com partners with TechEmpower to provide information source for mobile learning
Greenville, WI February 16, 2009: With an increasingly mobile society and the need for instant information for employees and students everywhere all the time, mobile learning and mobile performance support are growing at a rapid pace. Ambient Insight recently reported that the US market for Mobile Learning products and services is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.7%.
To provide access to the latest news and best practices a new content community has been created at http://cc.mlearnopedia.com. Content is aggregated from sites such as Cell Phones in Learning, Golden Swamp, mLearning is Good, mLearning World, mLearnopedia, moblearn, Mobile Commons, and MobileDot.
�The mlearnopedia project is a terrific idea at the right time! I look forward to being part of it,� states Judy Breck from Golden Swamp. Ben Bonnet from mLearning is Good commented �The cc.mlearnopedia.com community has already benefited me by providing exposure to content I normally would have missed.� The aggregation technology, called BrowseMyStuff, comes from Tony Karrer of TechEmpower with the support of Judy Brown from mLearnopedia.com.
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We've been thinking a lot about the millennial generation, but I've come to realize that within a few years, the next generation will start hitting middle school and the computing world. The post-millennials, born in the mid 90s, have not had a transition period into technology. Their parents, GenX or GenY, from before the post-millennials where born, have been bombarding them with technology.
We've all seen movies where women put headphones on their belly to give their unborn children a head start with Motzart music. These children will never know dial-up. Cracking a book in college will something in the history books. Video games will never be solo, but always an interactive experience.
We have all had the concern that keeping up with the millennials technological demands would be a challenge, but what of their younger siblings or children? Possibly, they may revert and become educational Luddites, but I truly doubt this.
My question is triggered from the thought that as education professionals, we are always behind the curve, trying to react to each generation's needs. Now, maybe if we start thinking about the need early, we may be ahead of the curve. What can we put in place to nurture them early, where there transition is smooth, and education doesn't follow technology, it is integrated with it.
Just a thought for open discussion.
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Very impressive by Hot Lava, teaching science through mLearning at sports stadiums. Brilliant. Great job guys.
Twitter, a social networking platform used for microblogging, is a free service that lets you send the briefest of messages (with a maximum of 140 characters) to everyone in your network. It marries the mass appeal of blogging with the speed and ease of text messaging.
There has been a growing interest in how to use these new forms of social media for learning & development. Driving this interest is the fact that Millennials, or those born after 1981, make up 22 percent of the workforce now and will grow to comprise 46 percent of the workforce by the year 2020...
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