Mobile Learning at Abilene Christian University

According to the iThinkEd blog, Abilene Christian University is unveiling its suite of mobile learning tools this weekend.  As you may have heard, ACU is giving all of its incoming freshmen iPhones (or iPod Touches) this fall.  Students will use those devices in and out of the classroom to access a variety of academic and social applications, including “polling and quizzing tools.”  These are among the tools ACU will be debuting this weekend, it would appear.

What might campus look like when all students have smart phones, cell phones with wireless Internet connectivity?  Well, several months ago, ACU released a video showing a “fictional, day-in-the-life account” of just that.  The second half of the video focuses on classroom possibilities, and I found the use of iPhones as classroom response systems very interesting.  The video shows how instructors might have students respond to free-response questions during class using their iPhones.  Responses are aggregated in a word cloud where the font size of a word or phrase indicates that response’s frequency.  This is a clever way to aggregate responses to free-response questions, and I would imagine that response devices that work like iPhones would make it easy for students to respond quickly to such questions.

I’m excited by these developments at ACU.  Using iPhones and other smart phones as response devices opens up all kinds of possibilities for engaging students in the classroom.  I look forward to hearing more about ACU’s mobile learning initiative, and I’ll certainly be tracking these developments.