Use of a student response system in Primary Schools — an empirical study

This paper reports a pilot study for a student response system (SRS) used in an English school. The technology used is the “Wireless Response System” – WRS developed at Huddersfield University, and the learning activities were conducted in Mathematics and English classes. The main concepts – activity based, problem based and opinion based learning – are adopted into the study. A case study was the method used in the investigation. The results show that the system is suitable for different sizes groups of users, who may choose their preferred question types. The school claims the use of WRS was successful, evidenced by the data collected, and the children and teachers were interested in using it. We conclude that the SRS can assist teachers in classroom teaching at primary school level, especially in the observations of engagement and effectiveness of students’ learning

Integrating Technical Advance in Mobile Devices to Enhance the Information Retrieval in Mobile Learning

It has been a long time since the wireless technology is used for the interaction between teacher and learners in learning activities. The recent advance of the mobile technologies has created new chances improving the flexibility, efficiency, and functionality of the learning interaction systems. This investigation identifies the weakness of the existing systems, and integrates the emerging mobile technologies to establish an open interaction framework to effectively enhance the interaction using students faced mobile devices and public wireless infrastructure. The main work of this investigation contains: (1) a teacher-learner response model for mobile based interaction is proposed and is described with state machine logic; (2) a presentation-content retrieval mechanism is designed to efficiently utilize the limited resource; (3) the device independent and context-aware techniques are integrated to created cross-platform application with mobile device features; (4) an open media framework is created for flexible learning material distribution and question organization. A lightweight mobile oriented web-based wireless response system (mobile-WRS) is implemented as a case study. In-house testing and classroom application of the mobile-WRS in universities demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the peer works in usability, interface, operational efficiency, learning material distribution, results presentation and performance assessment, etc.</p