Earlier today, Lisa Nielsen asked a question about a book on mobile phones. Her question got me to thinking about a book I'd like to see that addressed the use of handhelds and phones in education.
Section 1: Getting Started
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Chapter 1: A Brief History of Handheld and Mobile Devices. This chapter would be look at how this space has developed. Possibly, it could attempt to draw an existential distinction between the tablet, the laptop, the handheld, the PDA, and the smartphone.
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Chapter 2: What's What? A breakdown of the differences between different phones and handhelds that are currently available. How are these devices different from one another? How do these differences support different types of learning activities?
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Chapter 3: Operating Systems. This doesn't need to be too technical; rather, it just needs to provide an overview of the relative strengths and weaknesses between the iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry, Linux, and Windows based operating systems.
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Chapter 4: Handheld Devices and Connecting To The Internet. Part of this chapter should be devoted to data plans, and how the wrong data plan can trigger surprising costs.
Section 2: Approaches To Learning
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Chapter 5: Project-Based Learning. This chapter would explore how handhelds can be used to support project-based learning. This chapter would introduce high-level concepts.
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Chapter 6: Handhelds and Storytelling. This chapter would outline strategies for digital storytelling and community media that can be supported/enhanced via mobile devices.
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Chapter 7: Portfolios. This chapter would examine methods of using handhelds to support portfolio-based assessment/portfolio-based discussions of learning. This chapter would address strategies for teacher and student collected artifacts.
Section 3: Strategies and Lessons You Can Use
This section would provide strategies that could be implemented in classrooms. It would build off the theoretical base presented in the initial two sections to give people tools they can use, immediately. Ideally, many of these lessons/units would work across traditional curricular boundaries.
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Chapter 8: Early grades (K-2).
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Chapter 9: Elementary (3-5).
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Chapter 10: Middle School (6-8).
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Chapter 11: High School (9-12).
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Chapter 12: Adult Learning and Ongoing Professional Development.
And, at the risk of stating the obvious, this book would need to have an accompanying web site. Without this, much of the information in it would become obsolete quickly; while this would benefit publishers, it wouldn't benefit actual readers. Having this information freely available as open content on a web site would also allow this content to be accessed via the same handhelds described in the actual book; this would be both symmetrical and useful.
As I clean up this post, I actually wonder how much of this information already exists on the internet. If someone actually wants to write this book, that would be awesome! But I suspect that much of this content is already created and dispersed on the web; if that is the case, and you know where it is, feel free to throw links in the comments. I'll gladly rework this post to include links to any relevant information, and will give credit to both the people who passed on the link, and the original source of the content.
As an aside, I read Lisa's original post on my phone as I returned home from the office. As I prepared dinner (grilled shrimp marinated in lemon juice/olive oil/white wine/garlic/dill; over pasta, with a salad), I broke away periodically to read sections of this post into voice recognition software on my phone. Before lighting the grill (an old-school Weber, since you asked) I emailed it to myself. As the coals heated, I cleaned up the formatting, and did a final spell-check. In other words, before I had a phone, I probably wouldn't have written this, but a handheld device lowered the convenience threshold just enough to make it possible for me to write this out.
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