Mobile learning is considered to be the ability to use electronic mobile devices to support teaching and learning. It is the ‘mobile’ aspect of mobile learning that makes it stand apart from other types of learning, specifically designing learning experiences that exploit the opportunities that ‘mobility’ can offer us.This is because mobile devices have features and functionality for supporting learners.

There is a wide range of mobile devices on the market including laptops, PDAs, and e-book readers. But we will focus our topic on mobile phones. Mobile phones are multi-function devices which are of interest due to their very nature of offering ‘mobility’, but also for their ability to create and consume digital media and with the internet on our own hands, education gets a lot more easier.

Teaching using mobile devices uniquely offers us newfound mobility, and functionality opportunities that are not possible with desktop computers. These opportunities should at a minimum intrigue us and will hopefully lead to many new and exciting uses of mobile devices that we are able to take advantage of.

A Basic mobile phone features include:

• Making and receiving calls
• Sending and receiving text messages
• Basic office tools e.g. calculator

Advancedmobile phone features include:

• Bluetooth
• Camera capable of taking stills and videos.
• (e-book readers, games)
• Recording audio
• GPS / location aware
• Web browser to connect to the internet

These devices are ready for the virtual age. It can be of good use specially in teaching where any one can control whatever information you want to have on your mobile phone. Such information ranges from various lessons, books, articles and many more replacing the old book read style where students bring hard bound books to read every day.

Most new mobile phone devices have the ability to create digital media, typically still images and video with audio. This provides the opportunity for both teachers and learners to produce multimedia that can be used for discussion.

Further opportunities include devising new teaching and learning activity that takes advantage of mobility, and features such as GPS for location-based activity. Applications on mobile devices for education vary widely. For example, Apple Company has categorized Apps for Education purposes. They even have their own App, the iTunesU where you can download lectures of various universities about various topics right at the tip of your fingers. So opportunities for learning and education are limitless with these applications on board.

We are at a point where for at least a small percentage of our teaching and learning we can begin to incorporate part of the mobile learning experience into our course design. Initially this may simply mean that we acknowledge that some learners will interact with our course using mobile devices and impact how we choose to disseminate information.The use of mobile devices is here to stay and we can progressively accommodate this new platform to enhance our teaching and learning. Finally, the use of personal devices for both teaching staff and learners has blurred the line between formal and informal learning. The implications of which we’ll know more about in the near future.

By: RYSY MAY G. CONSTANTINO | Teacher I, | Limay National High School | Limay, Bataan