As I continue my research into mobile technology and its impacts on learning, I find myself reading “Tablet use in schools: a critical review of the evidence for learning outcomes” by B. Haßler, L. Major and S. Hennessy. This is a research study that basically seeks to find out if tablets actually help students to learn better or show ‘learning gains’ and what contributes to those gains if they are there. They used a complex system to evaluate what research was out there on the topic and weeded out many published forms of research that did not meet their criteria. In total, they found 33 articles or journals that met their strict criteria and based their findings off of those journals. They found that all but two of the studies they looked at found that tablets increase student learning or have a neutral impact on learning outcomes. They found the following factors to be key in students showing learning gains through tablet use:

• Easy to use and have many features
• Easy to customize
• Use of a touchscreen
• Portable

They also looked at 1:1 versus 1:m (many) and found that 1:1 use might not be the best course of action for schools to take for both fiscal and academic reasons. They believe that students produced better quality ‘artifacts’ when working as a group with one tablet because of the ability to collaborate verbally as a group. This would be a less expensive option for a district as well if they planned for only one tablet per group of students. As a teacher, I feel that having the option for both 1:1 and 1:m is important because the structure and needs of your lesson plans change constantly throughout the year. This article mentioned briefly that districts should also make sure that their staff is adequately trained in order to implement tablet use successfully, rather than assume that teachers already know how to best use the technology in their classroom.

The second article I read was “Thou shall not try to speak in the Facebook language: Students’ perspectives regarding using Facebook for chemistry learning.”. This article was supposed to describe the students’ attitudes towards using Facebook both for educational purposes and non-educational purposes and also to describe the needs of the students. I do not feel that this article did a good job explaining their feelings towards using Facebook but did an okay job explaining their needs (or things they didn’t want/need). The article spent a lot of time talking about formulas and research that I think was good, but not entirely needed for the results they were looking for. To sum up the findings, students seemed to give more useful responses in the form of things they didn’t want to see, based on the chart of ‘Thou Shall Not’s provided in the article. The study also found that students seemed to find the Facebook chemistry group less important to their learning after the second year, which the author even said might prove there needs to be a further study across a longer time frame.

The final article I read was, “Mobile devices and apps as scaffolds to science learning in the primary classroom.” This article sought to find how app scaffolding was used by students and how the teachers planned to use the apps within their teaching. The findings were not entirely surprising that the students preferred the use of video and audio scaffolding over textual scaffolding. What was surprising was that the students seemed to use the scaffolding pertaining to the experimental steps more often than the scaffolding for concepts. The author warned that teachers shouldn’t assume what scaffolding the students will be more likely to use because of surprises like that one. During the conclusion, the author also talked about the fact that a well-planned lesson and carefully-chosen apps are most important in designing a lesson. A common theme that I have seen in many readings. The reason this was added at the end was because of the fact that the teachers needed to help facilitate at many points during the experiments, thus showing the need for a teacher to be present during an app-guided lesson.

I found these articles to be useful as they pertain to my final project because I would like to plan on using tablets or laptops to create a flipped environment. In the first article, I had hoped to read about whether or not tablets seem to provide positive learning outcomes in the classroom, and was happy that the results were there and in a concise format. In a flipped environment there needs to be a learning management system of some kind, and at the moment I am open to ideas. I read the Facebook article hoping it would provide some anecdotal evidence that swayed me one way or another towards using it as a LMS, but I didn’t think the article provided enough information for that. In the final article I read, I wanted to read about the impact of apps in the classroom, as I would like to use apps for supplemental purposes after an art project is made. I found it to be helpful because it reminded me that even with supplemental materials or art games, students will still need my support in getting things to run smoothly.

Falloon, G. (2017). Mobile devices and apps as scaffolds to science learning in the primary classroom. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 26(6), 613–628

Haßler, B., Major, L., & Hennessy, S. (2016). Tablet use in schools: A critical review of the evidence for learning outcomes. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 32(2), 139–156.

Rap, S., & Blonder, R. (2017). Thou shall not try to speak in the Facebook language: Students’ perspectives regarding using Facebook for chemistry learning. Computers & Education, 114, 69–78.