Mobi LED

The aim is to supply educators with a mobile application that can be used to facilitate and support pedagogic practices in formal and informal learning scenarios as well as provide practitioners with a tool they would be able to use for data gathering using mobile technology.

As mobile technology extends the formal borders of the brick classroom to learning beyond the physical constraints, it is desirable to also extend the practice of assessment to those areas where learning occurs. As the MobilED initiative is grounded in classroom practice, the design focussed on current actions and activities of educators that need to be supported rather than a model of what these ought to be. Existing practice and requirements were taken as guidelines, with technology viewed not as an agent of change, but rather as a tool to support practice. The application consists of a “back-end” administration system and a mobile application that runs on a phone and is able to receive the responses of the end users. This application supports open ended questions as well as unrestricted optioned multiple choice questions.

Once a questionnaire has been created, it is “packaged” and can then be distributed via bluetooth or email (a, b and/or d) to any Java enabled mobile phone or technology. The “package” installs on the phone or other technology and presents the user with the questionnaire.  The questions can be redone and the user can scroll forward as well as backwards through the questions allowing the user access to voice and pictures files multiple times. When the questionnaire is completed the user can send a SMS (c) back to the educator or researcher’s phone.