From the course: Teaching Techniques: Blended Learning

Designing courses to blend with mobile

From the course: Teaching Techniques: Blended Learning

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Designing courses to blend with mobile

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- In a blended learning environment, students have to have some kind of technology device for accessing online course materials. More than likely, that device is going to be mobile. Maybe hard for some of us to imagine reading a research paper, creating a video or publishing an ePortfolio from a cell phone, or a tablet, but that's exactly what our students are doing. One of the big challenges these devices pose is how to effectively leverage them as tools for instruction, rather than having students distracted by them in class. The key to his approach is to fully engage students by using their mobile devices as an integral part of the class. For example, all the tools that we explored in the last chapter can be used on mobile devices, allowing every student to contribute. In this chapter, we'll look at ways to allow teachers and students to wirelessly share their mobile screens with the rest of the class, pointing out what works and what doesn't work with each solution. We'll step through the process of setting up an AppleTV, a ChromeCast, and a program called Reflector, that converts your Mac or Windows laptop into both an AirPlay and a ChromeCast receiver. These next three movies will be a bit more technical than anything else in the rest of this course. If your classroom already has one of these tools, or another wireless screen-sharing solution, then feel free to skip ahead, and see how to wirelessly connect your mobile device to the main screen in your classroom. Once you embrace using mobile devices as part of your course, a whole new world of opportunity will become open to you and to your students. We'll explore a few other ideas for using mobile in blended classes after we get connected.

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