I was able to attended the Apple Mobile Learning seminar (for higher education but off course any educators were welcome) at the VCA last week. Quite a few colleagues were there and it was also fun to bump into some twitter friends while enjoying something to eat and drink afterwards. Everyone who attended was provided with an iPod Touch (you could use your own iPhone of ‘Touch’ if you wanted) on the way in and we were asked to use them to provide feedback during the presentation. It was a neat demonstration of the (free) ‘Mobile Academic Platform’ (MobileAP) a web-based platform for creating interactive conference and classroom experiences. It contains features like question/response, discussion, link sharing and scheduling. It was great to be able to be part of he demo and to see how it worked from a user perspective.
The presentation focused on mobile applications and we were given time to check out the apps that were on the ‘Touches’. Some of them were; iHomework, Acid Plus, Medical Calc, Papers, Anatomy, OsiriX, Hubble, iStanford, Tally Counter, Free Piano, NYTimes, WSJ, Notecards lite, Critter Crunch lite (game), Blackboard, Art, Free wifi and AudioBoo (audioboo.fm) which all means I need to find a free afternoon to follow them up.
The focus on higher education meant that iTunesU was highlighted, and it’s good to see just what some unis are doing. Hopefully we’ll have our own channel delivering some worthy material soon enough. Overall a worthwhile event which gave us an insight into some of the developments in e-learning and application development for mobile devices as well as how mobile devices can provide engagement for students (as well as staff). Oh, and I didn’t win the iPod Touch 🙁
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