The article “Role of mobile digital technology in fostering the construction of pedagogical and content knowledge of mathematics” by Mohan Chinnapan discusses the findings of a research conducted on the uses of smartphones for sharing mathematics concepts and pedagogies with a peer. It also looks at the types of representations and models that can be constructed using a smartphone.
Although the research was conducted with teacher at a primary school level, the facts hold true for higher education too. Smartphones can be used not only as a tool to discuss and share material with fellow educators as well as the students. The biggest advantage I can see in this regard is the capturing of visuals (still or moving) of real-life engineering mathematical phenomena. One example that I can think of in this regard is the mixing of two streams of a fluid which are represented in mathematics by a tangent hyperbolic function. Another good example is the rate of change of volume of an inflating balloon which is an application of partial differentiation.
Smartphones can only be used to make videos of peer tutoring that takes place between students informally in a classroom. These videos can then be shared with the rest of the groups and peers for future referencing and access.
Students can also use smartphones to take audio snippets, images and videos of how certain complicated mathematical problem are solved in class. This can save the student the time spent copying and he can concentrate on the understanding of the solution. Again sharing and retrieving these files are as easy a click of a button.
The email and messenger facilities on the smartphones provide instant sharing opportunities with all the stakeholders and the extended memories of these handsets can store data which can be used throughout the study period.
Hi Atif, the thing about smart phones is that they are increasingly becoming more and more powerful computers and can almost be used as such. The mobility of these devices as you say enables the capture and immediate dissemination of real-time, real-life experiences which can be discussed and acted upon by group members who may not even be in the same country as the sender!! The potential for learning/ collaboration and immediate anytime-anywhere feedback is therefore increased. I suppose with blogs and emails accessible of these devices it's likely that our students are already using them to support their learning without us even knowing it!
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