Going Mobile

Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. She is co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, Learning English as a Foreign Language for Dummies and Teaching Online. She is currently working on a new book on Digital Literacies, and also on an e-book –Webinars.

Some weeks ago we had the opportunity to participate in the seminar “Going Mobile” where Nicky gave a talk about the use of a range of handheld devices across a range of contexts, and both inside and outside the classroom. There, she emphasized that mobile learning is learning that takes place via portable, often WiFi enabled, handheld devices. This includes things like smartphones, e-readers, small laptop computers, among others.

 Photo: Julieta Grassino Oliva

On her work Mobile Learning: what is it and why should you care?, she emphasizes that using mobile flashcards for vocabulary, watching video podcasts or listening to audio podcasts, using dictionaries on phones,etc are all mobile language learning activities that many learners already do. She also asserts that it’s up to teachers to let their students know about the mobile options and apps which are increasingly available to them, many of them for free, and which they can download and use for their own out-of-class learning.

According to our point of view, we should take advantage of the use of technology in the classroom (instead of avoiding its use). Nicky showed us a very interesting example of using the mobile phone in a grammar lesson: In pairs, students must look for images in their cell phones that contains:

_A pet.

_A very close friend.

_A celebration.

_An amazing view… etc.

They must then take it in turns to show their classmate the photographs and the other one will ask some questions related to it.

Why do we think that the activity is very interesting? Because we’re almost sure that students will have a photograph of each topic, and they will be exited of showing that photographs and talk about them. What is more, students will have the opportunity of using grammar in a very entertaining way.

After doing the activity, students must keep the cell phones in their bags. The objective of doing this, is to concentrate in what’s going on in the classroom and not to be distracted. (We can value a lot the idea that Nicky gave to us because maybe we wouldn’t realize that the cell phones can be a distraction once the exercise is over).

Another exercise that Nicky talked about is to take ‘selfies’ with the cell phones at a certain hour, about three times in a day. Then, students will talk about what they have done at that specific time. In this exercise, students can talk about routines in a very dynamic way.

All in all, despite the fact that the seminar was not very long, we collected examples of exercises we could use with our students employing their mobile devices and obviously, we can create our own exercises having in mind those examples.

It was a great opportunity and we enjoyed it a lot.

Thank you Nicky!