Bill Rankin's Mobile Learning presentation

After watching Bill Rankin´s presentation Mobile Learning at ACU: Full Presentation, I come to the conclusion that teaching and learning has always represented a challenge and has always experimented some problems and limitations. While long ago teaching was standardized, and basically done through personal experience or by using books as the primary source of information facing problems such as the limited access to information or being able to find what you needed in books and magazines, today the main issue that we as educators have to face, is the assessing of information that we and our students have access to. 

I do agree with the presenter, that today the amount of information that we can reach in one minute is overwhelming, and as a teacher I found very hard trying to identify which sources are trustable and which are not. It is time consuming and can be an exhausting job. This is even harder for the students, who tend to accept as a universal truth what ever they read on internet, and sometimes they end more confused and lost than before their research. I think that as a 21st century teacher, who is using technology in the classroom and taking advantage of the various ways that we can engage students through the use of different devices in the classroom allowing them to navigate and search for any information they might need whenever they need it, we as teachers committed to this new era of education, need to have the right preparation to guide them through this new ways of researching and learning. That is I believe our biggest challenge today.

This new area of education is here to stay, and I only see it growing more an more. After watching this presentation, I believe more than ever, that the use of devices in the classroom for educational purposes can definitely bring more advantages than disadvantages. What I have noticed in my class, is that when technology and the use of devices is involved in the lesson, students remain more focus and are more motivated because you give them space to work with what they like and with what they are good at, giving them also the freedom to work at their own pace, which is greatly appreciated by students with different abilities. We as teachers need to keep in mind that these devices are only another tool that we can use to reinforce and improve what we are already doing in the classroom. We cannot forget that we are there for our students as mentors, guiding them to become independent and responsible learners in our global world.