Mobile Learning

Make a live audience poll at Poll Everywhere

I used PollEverywhere to produce a quick poll on website usage for our Grade 5s. Because I work with K-5 the introduction of cell phones into our classrooms is not going to happen so we could not avail of cell phone voting.

Polleverywhere is an interesting website and although it pushes it's utility towards cell phone voting it doesn't make it too hard to vote using a widget.
I asked the question "What website do you use most at home?" For two sets of classes I used the "option poll" so the students didn't have free choice. Good to see that they visit their class blogs more than Facebook!

With the other two classes I used the "free text" based answers, because although I think I'm pretty hip to what websites Grade 5 students go to I wanted to see what the current trend is! With the text based answers poll I could not embed an input area into our Grade 5 blog so I had to link to the input box on the polleverywhere website.

Unfortunately on the final day of term before Easter break my G5 teacher forgot to give the poll to the kids so I tweeted it out to populate the poll. Unfortunately, again, some neanderthal decided to put a porn site down as their most favorite website to visit at home. So I had to take down the poll...


Mobile learning is certainly a technology that suits the age we live in. I have introduced 40 iPod Touches to our Kindergarten year which gives each classroom a set of 4 to use. We are also seeing how iPads can be utilized in the upper elementary school. So far it's harder to choose iPads over laptops. In my opinion, at the moment, iPads and Ipod Touches are at their most beneficial in the early years due to the vast amount of educational apps geared towards that age group.

We are living in transitional times regarding what technologies to use in our classroom. There are are debates and some quite heated ones going on in the comments section of blog posts and online newspaper articles. Again we are at a moment in technology evolution where some people are just plain scared of change and introducing any sort of "technological" item into the classroom to assist learning will set alarm bells ringing.

Educational technology is ever changing, ever innovating and the critics will always be evolving their counter-claims to any sort of change. The future is blurry but mobile technology is going to become a big part of education.