Learning by cellphone pushes the boundaries

Teachers could soon be conducting lessons in holograms around a family's dinner table if mobile technology continues to evolve, an award-winning Auckland teacher says.

Nathan Kerr from Howick College recently represented New Zealand at one of the world's largest teaching conferences, in Washington DC, and has come home with some exciting prospects for incorporating m-learning, or learning through mobile devices, into the curriculum.

As soon as next year, mobile phones will have in-built projectors, and Mr Kerr forecasts this will let students do things such as use their phone to create a film about a subject they are studying, then project it on to a wall in the classroom.

He imagines it will not be long before phones can project holograms.

"You could have a hologram of your teacher in the bus stop."

Mr Kerr was named the most innovative teacher in the world at Microsoft's international awards ceremony in Hong Kong last year for pushing the boundaries of learning through information technology.

While working at Onehunga High School, he pioneered m-learning, which he said enabled him to "meet students halfway" by recording lessons to be stored on mobile phones - students knew how to apply the technology and he helped them to source the learning material.

About 10 per cent of New Zealand schools use mobile phones to share documents, reinforce learning through multimedia functions and let students use recorded lessons on their mobiles wherever they are.

New Zealand has 6.5 million mobile phones and is at the forefront of using them in curriculum delivery.

Mr Kerr said teachers from Europe and the United States were impressed by New Zealand's progress.

In New Zealand it is the students who create the mobile phone applications they then use themselves, rather than a school buying expensive programmes from technology firms.

Mr Kerr said some New Zealand schools were resisting using mobile phones because of worries about etiquette and bullying.

He acknowledged that some researchers were concerned about the health hazards of excessive use of mobile phones.

But he felt m-learning was the way forward as it was the pupils who were driving it.