It’s been way too long since my last update on this blog. Stupid, since it’s something that forces me to write down what I’m doing. Let’s remedy that again.
The last weeks I have spent too much time on programming a high-fidelity prototype for my concept. Still, the result is very nice and the early reactions from the student’s were great!
Last friday I went to Fontys Eindhoven to have a creative session with two groups of students which are part of the Fontys iPad-project. They have been working with the iPad for around two months now and thus should have a pretty good idea on what its strengths and weaknesses are when using it for education. I visited the faculty of Communication and of the PABO.
The session consisted of a discussion about their current experiences with the tablet in their education and a brainstorm session for their associations about cooperation/collaboration and tablets.
The sessions themselves went great. I was rather worried that it would stagnate, especially during the brainstorms, but everyone kept the good ideas coming and seemed to have a good time. Thanks again to all the students and teachers that helped me.
Posted in Education, Inspiration, Research
One of the main assumptions in my project is that cooperative learning improves learning as a whole. However, I had yet to find research that actually supported that assumption. Thanks to one of my acquaintances, Fanny, I managed to get my hands on a couple of good papers.
The best result I got from this is a good research question:
How can cooperative learning on tablets encourage students to ask and give help to others?
Posted in Collaboration, Research
A question that often pops up when I talk about my graduation project, is why tablets would work better in education than other platforms. Especially educators themselves are really skeptical, since they either doubt the effectiveness of absorbing knowledge that comes digitally, or because they are anxious about another piece of technology forcing its way into the education market.
Both are valid concerns, so I’ll address the second now. Why would you use tablets in education instead of, say, interactive whiteboards, Microsoft Surface tables, laptops or smart phones? What makes a tablet so significantly different from these technologies that it would be worthwhile to use it in education?
Posted in Research
In an effort to figure out what kind of software is prevalent in education, I looked around trying to find examples and categorizing them. What I came up with are seven categories that represent the most typical applications.
Educational software can roughly be split up in seven categories: study material, games, reference, organization and planning, practice, creativity, collaboration and cooperation.
A Pad Full Of Noodles 
