Abstract:

A student who does not pay attention to the class progress will surely not learn, unless he has the natural skills of an autonomous student, which is very difficult. There are students who are physically present, but mentally absent, which means that they do not engage in the educational process. Smart phones can also be used as tools to support learning in the classroom. There are also many positive experiences in which the smartphone is an essential element for learning. This paper evaluates the use of an own tool developed at the University of Almeria, to a second year of an engineering degree in the year 2019-20. This tool involves a bot of Telegram, which is programmable. The tool allows for anonymous surveys in class, and therefore students can use it as an interactive response control. This communication presents two goals. The first one assesses the level of satisfaction of the students with the application about the following issues: Facility of use of the tool, Usefulness of the tool in class, Improvement of the participation in class, Being attentive to the explanations, Level of satisfaction with the tool, and opinion regarding its massive implementation in all subjects. The second goal has been to evaluate the degree of attention in class. To this end, about 80 questions have been asked in both theory and practice classes, just at the end of the explanation, to check the students' instantaneous success with regard to the explanation given. As a conclusion of this work, despite the fact that the level of attention has not been high, it is that looking for attractive tools and using a kind of game, such as surveys in class, has turned out to be a great strategy to capture the attention of students and has served to motivate the participative performance of the class. In short, although students are supposed to be intrinsically motivated, the data have shown that this is not fully true. The student's attention is more easily attracted when the topic and the didactic resources that the teacher proposes and possesses are interesting. Since the subject cannot be modified, what can be done is to use tools such as the use of their own smart phones, since attention needs to be motivated to make better use of face-to-face lessons.

Keywords:

Higher education Innovation, Smartphone, Telegram, attention level, Interactive response system, motivation.