Mobile? Learning at Manchester College.

The LSC will allocate a further £2.5m to continue to support the mobile learning in Further Education and Skills project ,MoLeNet for another year to add to the £12m spent in 2007/8.

Despite the crisis in the LSC capital funding the MoLeNet project goes from strength to strength industry and education members of the project advisory board were told in Manchester on Friday.

Stephen Nichols, from the LSC said,

“We are delighted at the positive outcomes of Molenet 1 and 2 and will be looking to Molenet 3 to focus on sustainability, productivity and employability. We are also keen to encourage specialist colleges to get more involved in the next round.” He added

Mobile Learning has continued to grow in popularity and has proved invaluable in increasing access to learning and engaging and motivating learners in colleges and also in work based learning.

John Cannon, Director of Skills for Learning, at Manchester College was very enthusiastic about the potential of mobile learning in the college;

“The learning gains have been spectacular” said John “students who have found literacy and communication challenging have been transformed into confident learners.”

A range of showcases demonstrated learners using voting kits, net books, Nintendo Wii, MP3’s and Natalie, Parveen, and Dean, part of the preparation for independent work programme demonstrated the potential of the mobile games consoles on their spelling and numeracy ability.

In all the examples demonstrated the College had purchased the mobile devices for the students and they were predominantly used in classrooms.

An interesting perspective emerged when the learners described the mobile technologies they already own and use in their own time, which often exceeded the capacity and capability of the college bought equipment.

Perhaps this might explain why the LSC are asking Molenet 3 bidders to focus on sustainability and capacity building?

www.molenet.org.uk

Dean,Parveen and Natalie have improved their spelling and numeracy by practising at home on their own devices.

Trackback

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Flux, events, general ramblings, learning spaces, mobile, news, teaching and innovation, tools and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.