Mobile Learning

Poll Everywhere

My poll I created for my students on decimals.
I created three questions to gauge their understanding on what is a decimal, how to order and compare then, and how to add them.
I cannot use pool everywhere with my students since they are 4th graders and are not allowed to use cell phones at school. I know that three of my students have cell phones but use them at home. Instead of using poll everywhere with my students I would use it with parents. I could use it at "back to school" night and poll parents with their questions and understanding of the content taught for the year. I could use their feedback on what day they would like homework to come home and how best to communicate with them.
My district has used Poll everywhere with teachers during professional development day and I that was my first interaction with it. I was impressed with the quick feedback of the program and how a graph can be made from the results. You can leave open the poll open for an extended amount of time and even input the data into Power Point to be shared.
Results

MP3 Players
- I connect my I Pod to my audio system so share music for morning meeting and classic music during work time. We used this as rewards and students are always excited to request songs and there seems to be more interest when music is played this way compared to using Pandora.com
-I thought that this article on using MP3 players in the classroom was really interesting, especially the part with audio books. I have a few students that are well below grade level for reading and feel that the use of audio books could be integrated into their modified curriculum. These students are interested into many texts that their grade level peers are reading such as "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" but are too difficult to read alone. They would still be able to converse with their peers about these texts with the use of the audio books on a Kindle, Ipad, Iphone, MP3 player when using Project Gutenberg.

I found that participating in the Classroom 2.0 blog about cell phone use was very enlightening. I had used Poll everywhere before in a district meeting and during this course but was introduced to http://wiffiti.com/ by a post that I read. It seems similar to Poll everywhere but there are some added graphic available such as custom screens and key words to search for.