When the high school where I teach launched its mobile learning pilot in the fall of 2011, teachers on the team were commonly asked, “What are you really going to do with those iPods? Won’t the kids just play with them?” While initially getting defensive, I began to embrace the idea of play as central to learning, and I began to use mobile devices and mobilized learning as a way to help my students play, discover, and create.
Wordplay is common throughout the history of literature and language. The Anglo-Saxons insulted each other for fun in Beowulf, and Shakespeare was no slouch when it came to playing with words and phrases in riotously entertaining ways. Why shouldn’t teenagers get to have the same kind of fun in their English/Language Arts classroom?
Linked here (BELOW) is the presentation I delivered at Mobile 2012, a “mobile learning experience” that took place in Phoenix, AZ, on April 11-13, 2012. During this session, I discussed a variety of mobile device-enhanced examples of standards-based, productive uses of wordplay in a high-school English classroom. My students are using mobile devices to comprehend concepts and content, to envision what they read, to crystalize their own thinking, and to have fun sharing their work authentically with each other. (Also linked in this post–BELOW–are the QR Code handouts shared during my session.)
iOS apps featured during the presentation included Songify, ComicBook!, WordFoto, Poetry (from The Poetry Foundation), and the i-nigma QR Code Reader.
Additionally, I recommended a list of ELA “must-have” apps: Shakespeare (the free version is fine), iBooks, Street Tag, Videolicious, Splice, Dropbox, Amazon (for its “Snap It” cover searching), Flickr, and Rory’s Story Cubes.
Learning Sideways 