mLearning Practices and Tools
Häme Polytechnic, Digital Learning Lab, Pasi Silander
University of Helsinki, Anni Rytkönen
City of Oulu, Department of Education, Pasi Mattila
City of Oulu, Department of Education, Timo Fordell

Mobile devices like mobile phones bring new dimensions to education. They extend the learning environment and integrate it with real life environments like the real surrounding or working places, where learning can occur in an authentic situation and context. Learning practices in real environments are influenced by the pedagogical, technical and contextual contexts. Educators have to use different means to foster learning in authentic environments than traditionally have been used in a class room. The traditional teaching process does not apply to the mLearning process, because traditional teaching is based on the teacher’s teaching process, whereas mobile teaching has to be based on the design of the learner’s learning process. In mobile learning occurring in the authentic environment, situational factors have different influence on the student’s learning process than in traditional Web-based training or in distance courses.

Our experience shows that pedagogically driven and designed techniques can make a difference in the learning settings, if they are carefully designed to fit the real users' context and support the individualization of the students' learning processes. In the presentation we illustrate the pedagogical practices in mLearning by two concrete showcases.

Älykkö is an intelligent mobile tutoring tool for teachers. It enables interaction and tutoring dialogue via mobile devices like mobile phones (SMSs) and PDA's .The tool contains semiautomatic and automatic guidance for learners' learning processes, enabling individualization. In addition, Älykkö contains ready-made tutoring expressions and a documented tutoring dialogue for teachers' use, in order to reduce the teacher's cognitive load needed just for memorizing. Älykkö is created based on the examination of the teachers' pedagogical needs. The development of Älykkö mobile intelligent tutoring tool is funded by European Social Found

Moop is an interactive mLearning environment for situations where primary school pupils take use of a mobile phone to analyze their surroundings and to communicate within groups. Through Moop, a pupil makes observations and saves and manages information in the mobile and network learning platform. The goal is to increase interactivity and collaboration in learning with the help of a mobile phone. In the Moop environment the mobile learning is realized through tasks based on geographical location and requiring creative problem solving. Camera phone is familiar for pupils and a meaningful tool for communicating and working.

In addition the pedagogical model developed for mobile tutoring – AEFIRIP – will be introduced and discussed more closely.