Mobile Learning with Moodle, Mahara and Geogebra — Getting started

This term one of my classes (starting higher general secondary school with 14/15 year old students)  is a class equipped just with one pc and a beamer. No laptops and perhaps only sometimes the possibility to use a computer lab. But everyone including our refugees has a working mobile phone. Perfect.

In late 2017 times are very favourable for such an endeavour: mobile clients for both iOS and Android are available for Mahara and Moodle which are using latest technologies; Geogebra just released a new version transforming almost any mobile phone into a very powerful graphing calculator; Moodle and Mahara are usable on mobile browsers. All of this is free software — a very important aspect.

There are many very different difficulties to master: technical aspects (different hardware, different operating systems, getting connected to the internet from a probably very restricted intranet in your school) and pedagogical aspects (mobile access on very small screens vs. using bigger tablets or laptops, offline and online working, assessment…).

In this (planned) series of posts I will report my way through all the obstacles hopefully being able to tell what really was working well. Stay tuned.

Getting all of us online

So the inevitable first step is an inventory of all the devices and trying to get them online. Don’t even think of this being a small step — or a fast one. There are students from our own school — online within seconds. And there are new ones, more ore less used to changing system configuration. This can only be done if your are very technical oriented person, in any other case ask your sysadmin. I did it myself as I am very experienced doing such stuff. And take your time. After one hour I had success in 10 of 16 cases. So another hour will be necessary.

 

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[…] obviously has to be done next. As my students mobiles (see part 1) have both Android and iOS devices a solution has to support both (so a Miracast or Apple TV Box is […]

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[…] starting this term (see here) I did not know which program or other solution would be best. After some research the three […]