Belated {Birthday} Visit Post

Well this post is a few months late - but what the heck I'm going to write it anyway.  Back in September, around my birthday, Don, De and Deanna came to visit me and see my new townhouse.  It was really great to see them and to be able to show them around my first real home.  They brought me a birthday card which was really sweet.  Here are some pictures from their visit.  They were on their way to an NC State football game, and I just got home from the gym - hence the sports-themed attire.  Go Pack!

{The gang's all here!}

{welcome, welcome, welcome}

{stairs slidgeage}

{Deanna insisted on cleaning my entire kitchen with a sponge. De looks amused.}

{whoa there! missed a spot...}

{now smile and say "Type-A!"}

{moving onto bigger and better things - like couch modeling}

{sweet little thing}

{a little monkeying around}

{Hawaiian Punch - my beverage of choice when Deanna was in the womb and now she loves it too!} 

Mobile Learning in ELT: Survey 2013

In 2010, after buying my first iPad I decided to do some research into how teachers were using mobile devices in their classrooms and their teaching. At this stage ‘smart’ phones were already starting to make an impact and tablet devices were just coming onto the market.  The research results from this first survey were published in the Guardian Online under the title ‘English language teachers connect to mobile learning’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/14/teachers-mobile-learning and the complete results and report can be downloaded from: http://technogogy.org.uk/mobile_survey.pdf

I followed this research up in 2011 using the same survey questions in an attempt to see how things had advanced with the intervening period and the results from that survey were  published in May 2011 on the DELTA Publishing blog under the title ‘mLearing and ELT: Are We Mobile Ready?’ http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/development/mlearing-and-elt-are-we-mobile-ready

One of the main observations from this survey was that many teachers were in fact ready and willing to embrace mobile learning and mobile devices, but that publishers seemed to be more reluctantly lagging behind.

Over the last 18 months since publishing the 2011 survey results, mobile learning seems to have made its way into the main stream of discourse surround the implementation of educational technology in our schools and universities, so I have decided once again, thanks to the support of the Bell Educational Services Teacher Training department,  to launch a more extensive survey building on the original one to try to discover the extent to which the ‘talk’ about mobile learning has had any genuine impact and realisation in our schools and classrooms over the past three to four years.

Whether you use technology, mobile learning or avoid it please find time to answer these 20 questions and share your ideas, opinions and reflections and I will once again publish the results for all to share.

• Mobile Learning in ELT 2013 Survey

Many thanks for your help and participation.

Related links:

• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

Best


Nik Peachey