Article Review 1

Article Review 1

http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/02/17/mobile-phones-educational-apps-and-the-digital-divide/

This article, written by Audrey Watters in 2011, really has me thinking!  As I designed this independent study course, I wanted to discover the benefits and drawback of educational use of apps, and design my own, but as the author indicates, only 27% of mobile devise owners actually own smart phones.  This statistic drastically reduces in minority populations, and global populations.  Is it actually practical to create an app?  As Ms. Watters suggests, would it not be better to design a great website that can be easily accessible on any web browser?  I greatly appreciate her use of the term "shiny app syndrome" as I feel I too am victim of this mindset.

Even though this article has made me think a bit (which is probably a good thing), I am proceeding with my voyage of app discovery and development.  Being a classroom teacher for five years, I recognize the important of "shiny" and "new" in the classroom.  Even though my students do not all own person devices, we have a set a iPod touches and wifi available to us as needed.  The students ask all the time, "Mr. Gravitt, when can we use the iPods again?"  I like to keep it that way - something the students want to use.  It creates a desire to use these devices to learn.

Yes, it is true, websites need to be a bit more user friendly (hence why I decided on creating a site on blogger versus other sites - I wanted the built in mobility), but for the education world, shouldn't we be happy with students being excited to do something?  Sometimes we need "shiny" and "new" to keep our classroom environments working in harmony.  Particularly in a non-core content course (like German), we're got to include these things to keep our subject up to date and relevant to the students and what they perceive to be cool.