The Perils & Pitfalls of Mobile Tech in Schools

I do have the occasional rant about things. Most of the time it is down to having passion about things I believe in or it is intend to grab the attention of others to make them think. Last night at TeachMeet Midlands 2011 it was a bit of both.

I recently spent a good 30 minutes breaking down what is wrong with trying to use mobile tech in schools, the naivety of some folk, the plain stupidity of others and the frustration of having to deal with people who are just blockers, have personal ethos issue which blind them to people using particular tech or who are just plainly wasting money! The other day, when chatting with Shaun Garriock (one of the Directors of EduGeek.net) on Skype, I ran through some of these to break it down into smaller chunks.

Since I now like to give people a chance to see what I present at TeachMeets I videoed myself doing this ‘slightly longer than the official 7 minutes’ rant and intended to just play it at the TeachMeet … but as people who were there, or who watched it online, there was a tech fail. Apparently videos using Quicktime was not expected, nor using a site which needed the QT plug-in. Normally I would just upload it to Vimeo but I didn’t want to risk a problem accessing it so stuck it on my own webspace. This did play to my advantage though … as it showed haw tech can sometimes just not work. I was happy to just pick up the mic and speak … and rant … and whilst I did not get all of what I wanted to say out I tried to cover the key areas on personal devices, relying on 3G, trying to manage apps, problems with charging devices, issues with proxies, using a managed wireless network …

Below is the planned presentation (now hosted on Vimeo) and I give a solemn promise to spend some time to put together the full 30+ minutes … and I will try to break it down into small chunks to make more sense. If anyone has good examples of where things just have not worked as expected, where they are doing things which take far more time than planned, where they have had to come up with workarounds … then please email them to me via [email protected] and I will try and incorporate them over time. The first thing I will talk about it proxies and wireless networks so get those stories and ideas coming forward. I hope you enjoy the video below.

TeachMeet Midlands 2011 – The Perils & Pitfalls of Mobile Tech in Schools from Tony Sheppard on Vimeo.