Usefulness of Smartphone as educational tools

1. Usefulness of Smartphone as educational tools RE 1J Group 2 Elson Neo (6) Emrick Quah (7) Ryan Foo (8) Gavin Han(9) Jason Kit (10)

2. Contents • Description (slide 3) • Objectives (slide 4) • Introduction (slides 5-6) • Background (slides 7-8) • Methodology (slide 9) • Results and analysis (slides 10-18) • Conclusion (slides 19-24)

3. Description • We are doing this project on the usefulness of smart phones as educational tools. • We want to find out how smart phones can be used to educate and teach younger generations.

4. Objectives • We intend to find out and understand how smart phones can be used to educate the younger generations • We hope that this research will help app makers decide on a suitable app for a wide ranging audience

5. Introduction • We decided on this topic as it seemed an important and relevant issue • Smartphones are widely popular as they have many uses • Smartphones can be used for educational purposes • Smartphones are more widely known for gaming and connectivity features • Their ability to serve as an extra learning portal for students is neglected

6. Introduction (cont.) • The purpose of this project was to find out the usefulness of educational applications. • From the results, we can conclude whether educational apps are of use to students. • The study will show the practicality, usefulness and shortcomings of smartphones as educational tools

7. Background (cont.) • Smart phones can download applications, have wireless access to the internet, email, calculator, dictionary etc. • These features make smart phones indispensable and make them ubiquitous to our lifestyles.

8. Procedure • Social Survey • Interview

9. Methodology-Survey • A survey was conducted on the student population to find out their views on the usefulness of Smartphones as an educational tool. • The 20 students we surveyed consisted of 1 Year 4, 1 Year 3 and 18 Year 1s,as the Year 1s were our main focus.

10. Survey Results Figure 1: This graph shows the change in the respondents’ academic results after being exposed to educational Smartphone apps. This shows that Smartphones do not play an important role in causing a change of results.

11. Survey Results 2 From our survey, we found out that 4 of our respondents had less than 2 educational apps on the smartphone, 11 of them had 2 to 5 apps, and the remaining 5 had 6 or more.

12. Survey Results 3 This graph shows the number of respondents who would and would not recommend an educational Smartphone to others: Figure 2: From this, it is apparent that many people believe in the potential of Smartphones as an educational tool.

13. Survey results-Discussion • When asked about the greatest shortcoming of a Smartphone as an educational tool, respondents mostly gave feedback that other games could be distracting. From this, it can be inferred that currently, educational apps for Smartphones are unable to capture the audience’s interest. • Hence, it can be said from our survey results that although Smartphone educational applications are well received by students in general, are not very effective in influencing students’ academic performance, and are felt not to have reached their full potential.

14. Methodology-Interview • We conducted an interview so as to gain an insight into others’ perception of Smartphone education. • Our group chose Miss Stephanie Lee as the interviewee because she was an active user of a Smartphone. Besides, since she was one of the younger teachers in the staff, we felt that she would relate better to the youth population today. Hence, her responses would be more relevant to our research.

15. Interview results • In general, Ms Lee felt that computers would still be better as educational tools as Smartphone capabilities fall far behind the computer. • She also felt that although educational applications would assist the student’s learning, there would not be a great improvement in grades. • However, she stated that she would not be likely to use an educational application in the future, as the standards are “not there yet”. She explained that a major improvement for Smartphone applications would be to include options within the application to suit the user’s learning style.

16. Application • These results can be used to improve the effectiveness of Smartphones as an educational tool. For example, application developers can make a conscious effort to make their app more interesting. • Also, this might alert the student population that the usefulness of Smartphones as a tool in education is not as great as they might think.

17. One of our group members went overseas and left us short of one member with the survey results due • Various meetings were called for but less than half of the group turned up due to the absentees having other commitments, such as third language. Problems encountered

18. Problem 1: Missing Group Member • We had to again cover up for him and we tried our best to contact him through email but to no avail. • We could probably have done it by ourselves instead of expecting him to do it while overseas.

19. Problem 2: Meetings • The people who turned up for the meetings would include the others through mail concerning the content written and discussed during the meeting. We also sent assignments to the missing group members to look through so they would not be excluded. • We should probably have finished the whole thing in one shot during the meeting to save time.

20. Limitations and delimitations

21. Future extensions In the future, this project could be extended by opening up the subject pool to make it wider. We could also have more people to achieve greater reliability for our research.

22. Final Analysis In conclusion, it can be said about Smartphone education that while the idea well-received by the general public, the applications have not yet reached their full potential, hence hindering its popularity and the probability of people using it in the future. Hence, Smartphones have a low effectiveness as an educational tool, but this is because the idea has not been fully developed yet.