EXPERIENCES WITH USE OF WEB-BASED STUDENT RESPONSE SERVICES FOR IPOD TOUCH AND IPHONE

A new type of Student Response Services (SRS) for next generation wireless mobile handheld devices with pressure sensitive screens, iPod Touch and iPhone, is demonstrated. They are constructed for use in vocational education and training, and in engineering courses. This is achieved through easy and flexible integration with interactive touch screen blackboards by utilizing Flash in combination with Flex. The European Commission cofounds the R&D during 2008-10.

Pedagogical challenges related to the new roles of teachers and students in the educational process will be demonstrated. This includes opening up for new classroom communication, e.g. formative and summative assessment purposes. The services provide session control, a flexible framework for generating questionnaires, and easy and fast to use interfaces for teachers and students. The services was during the summer and fall 2009 tested and validated in training of staff from industry in Norway, UK, Sweden, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. The evaluations show excellent feedback form the students.

The services are based up on XML-based standards and web authoring facilities for the contents available on web pages, by providing XML-based universal notation and interface including visualization of scientific and engineering drawings and graphs. The search facilities retrieve the postulates of the instructor through a service-oriented architecture that integrates semantic web into the system for retrieval of information from the knowledge base system. iTunes Store is not used, and the decision process solution system is open, flexible to achieve maximum interoperability.

The SRS knowledge cycle contains 4 basic elements:
• The teacher provides a question, task or problem to activate the class and assess student achievement through progress monitoring
• The students use their SRS to give anonymous feedback from the whole class to the teacher
• The teacher and the class get a knowledge map with the results displayed instantaneously at the Smartboard or projector surface
• The teacher must, based up on the results, decide which type of feedback can be provided on the fly to the class.

The instructor lead educational process includes:
• Short sequential lessons, to be followed up by tasks where students give feedback by using SRS
• The SRS questionnaires exploit ICT enhanced learning assets
• Structured, critical thinking creative problem based learning activities that collect individual or group responses anonymously
• A flexible in class discussion sequence, that in some cases may end up with a new SRS decision process
• Summary and explanation, reflecting the profile of the response from class
• The system solution is web based and generic, whereby it may be utilized in all kind of process and product oriented instruction and training activities.

This paper will discuss experiences and design approaches of the new student response services for iPod Touch and iPhone in education of engineers, keeping in mind the pedagogical challenges in the new learning environment. We will in particular address how boys and girls use the SRs in different ways during the teaching.

European Community supports the work presented in this paper as a pilot project under the KA3 ICT program.