MOBILE LEARNING AT DENTAL PATHOLOGY AND THERAPEUTICS STUDIES

Introduction:
Information and Communicating Technologies (ICT) have entailed a big change in the relatioship channel between the teacher and the student.
Mobile telecommunications is one of the technologie which has, quantitatively, grown more in the Spanish society. This is the main reason why we think that its application to the educational field might be highly useful.
To achieve this objective we have developed an educational performing protocol through a database management software (FileMaker Pro v.13.0.1 with academic license) whose finality is to interact with the students.

Material and Method:
FileMaker Pro version 13.0.1 database management software has been chosen in rder to create several documents which establish a relationship between the teacher and his students.
Two different documents are elaborated. One of them comprises a containter field in which any type of information can be published; whether it is text, image, sound or a combination of all of the above.
The other document is dedicated to the student’s continuing evaluation. It consists of several tabs, each corresponding to one of the different sections in which the teaching of the subject Dental Pathology and Therapeutics I is organised in the third course of the Odontology degree at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Each tab presents a number of fields where every variable to be evaluated is detailed.
These documents can be shared with any person for them to be consulted and edited on their mobile phones.

Discussion:
Two of the characteristics that confer the mobile phone an advantage over other ICT are its immediacy and movility.
It is every time more taken into account the value of the students’ learning time. In our case, beginning to use these type of documents does not entail any time loss for the students, as its interface design is really intuitive and they are familiarized with this kind of software.
Movility is this mobile technology’s other main characteristic; as the student can access the information everywhere and non depending on any landline data network.
Our information can also be stored in any remote hosting service such as iCloud, DropBox, Box or similars, and it can be accessed whenever it is desired.

Furthermore, unique and personal information can be sent to each student or to a group of them to share information and edit it if necessary.
All of the already mentioned entails another very important issue about current teaching; and it is communication between academic institutions and the rest of the society, which is not physically present in them. The information that exits our universities reaches the students’ social and familiar environment and it can also be shared with other people or through the social network, creating an information flow which could be denominated “Academic Information Chain” (AIC).