Ideal World of Mobile Learning

Hi All,

At SWOT we are always looking ahead to see how technology can help enhance the delivery of learning content for students of all ages. All too often, technology in the classroom, far from being a saviour, can be a disruptive force, making teachers jobs harder than they might otherwise be.
Decisions on how, when and where to best integrate ICT and the Internet in to the wider curriculum, can leave school staff with a growing headache.
Schools IT teams become equally bamboozled by the plethora of Devices, Applications and Content which they are asked to support.

Here we are talking a little about some of the problems using the Internet in the Classroom and what we at SWOT are doing to help.

Web based content can be hard to acquire, with both teachers and schools IT having to navigate LEA/ GfL or other filter system rules, requesting pages to be unblocked in the case of particular need. Sometimes, just getting to the page you want is a full day mission. This is far from ideal in a world where instant access to data is the normal.
It's not as simple as leaving the web open, this would be easy but, essentially extremely dangerous. Schools have a duty of care, especially where minors are concerned.
Schools and academic institutions are by nature, open and free places, where an amount of free roam is necessary in order to develop the learners abilities in research for example, and so this nature provides us a hurdle which we must cross when introducing the Internet and Web 2.0 learning.

Whenever we use the Internet to support classroom activities, we have the further concern of keeping students on task. Filter systems help with this of course and we have seen many classroom management applications that have been developed but, most of these solutions are reactionary, in that they provide historic data on user activity.  At SWOT we've been hunting for a better way.

We asked the question, "What if we had a system, that would allow individual teachers the chance to organise a set of sand-boxed URL web addresses which any student with a networked device could access?" This is to say, a teacher could decide, in advance of any lessons, what web pages where suitable for the students to access. By pre packing a set of URL's, students would only be able to see what teaching staff wanted them to see. It would simply not be possible for students to wonder off task or find their way on to unsuitable web content.
If we then said, how about we allow teachers to create lesson or course bundles, containing not only the helpful URL's but, educationally approved YouTube/ Video content, minus the scary comments we see on YouTube of course, PDF, Office Docs, Google Docs, and all manner of other file types, again sand-boxed in to an easy to access location. Well, at SWOTNET, we have found a way to make this a reality and its called " Lightspeed Systems - My Big Campus" and this forms a vital part of our "TaLENT - Teaching and Learning Education Network Template" read more here. MBC and Lightspeed are new to the UK, but, the company has already taken the US by storm and is growing here rapidly. SWOTNET are a leading UK partner!

Even if you don't provide your own Internet filtering via in house systems and you go through the grid or other LEA system, our platform has been approved for your use.
What's more, this means we can create Web Zones. A Web Zone is a controlled space that allows teachers to temporarily override a filter system. Lets say you have a 6th form class of art students and you are discussing the great Rembrandt, you may wish to access images that the central filter system would normally block. With our MBC system, which is approved by the Grid among others, schools can now permit designated teaching staff, or all teaching staff (or non) to temporarily grant access to certain users. Again this is highly controlled, and for management, a full audit trail is created ensuring every action is transparent.
The beauty of the MBC system is such that, we can extend these very same features to your students, with school owned devices off campus too.

The MBC platform has a heap of other really cool features and we will cover a few here.


It has a digital repository so teachers can access an ever increasing amount of content to help enhance lesson/ course bundles. If you are completing a course on the Human Body, or Trench Warfare, there is content ready, submitted by teachers using the MBC system around the world and its all conveniently categorised to make it really simple. You can locate content by topic and even age range suitability. See examples here
To make the process of using MBC easier, the system also has Edu Talk. This empowers teachers and educators to share experiences, collaborating with other users, ideas and methods, discussing what works best for example. This is a real positive. there are currently around 1 million teachers supporting each other via the Edu Talk portal in MBC its really wonderful to see this figure growing all the time and we see this as a vital tool to help meet CPD options.

The platform developers are listening to the academic community too and in fact, MBC could not have been developed without the input of real teachers, actively pushing new features and enhancements to the platform. it really is a platform designed for education, designed by educators.

So, what does MBC look like for students? Students get an experience which looks and feels like Facebook. All of the ways to share information, such as feed updates, chat, email are presented in a way which your students will likely be very familiar with. This is intentional of course and really helps productivity and user uptake.
MBC updates and messages are scanned for cyber bullying via a clever bot which automatically looks for problem messages and alerts staff to possible issues. The system can redact messages in real time, preventing the posting of offensive, obscene or bullying language from being posted. As with most stuff in MBC, lists of terms can be added to and customised by admin staff.
All of the work students require can be found in one location. Calendars, Forums. We could talk for a long time about the features of MBC but, to save your eyes and our keyboards, we will be a running a series of events over the coming months to live demo the systems. We can deliver 14 day trials at your schools, and even deploy the MBC via our e2e secure cloud.
Costs per pupil are low and annual. it really does represent value for money, enabling access to what is a real game changing platform for education.
The full offering includes: Filtering, Email Management, Anti Virus, MBC, Power Management, Access to 24/7 Support and Advanced Reporting. We can provide the system in component parts too and deliver this on premise or in the cloud as a hosted platform and as part of our TaLENT framework.
Do reach out to us for more info at the usual http://www.swotnet.co.uk/contact/

Happy studies
team SWOT

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