Video conferencing about mobile apps – #OPCO12

This time the video conference was really great, though I unfortunately missed half of it. Not sure what I was thinking when I read the date, but I somehow mentally booked the next video conference for the next Wednesday and was surprised when I read in Twitter that the conference had already started.

However, I am lucky in this circumstances in a double sense. First, I can review the conference later and second, I am not sure how longer I would have been able to follow-up the chat. Both the lecture from PD Dr. Christoph Igel, the Managing Director from CeLTech, was very interesting, as well as the chat. On participant expressed what I felt as well, that is was this time almost impossible to follow both the lecture and the chat. Especially the chat was so fast paced this time, full of interesting topics where I joined in and would have like to follow-up a lot more, but frequently I realized that I was not longer listening to Christoph Igel, which was a pity, because of all the interesting information he provided.

So what to do? Engage more in the chat or listen to the lecture?

Well, I continued to concentrate more on the spoken word, yet I wonder how fast some participants can type, and it seems that some can type really quick on their smartphones as well, admirable 😉

Nevertheless, often after such sessions or having visited a conference or a fair, I feel quite disenchanted and left far behind, comparing e.g. the successful application in mobile learning that Christopher Igel talked about with the situation in my vocational school. I agree with all those who commented in the chat that it is not all about technology, but als well who purposeful and pedagogically sound you employ it, and that some teachers need to change their attitudes and finally embrace the new technologies and make use of it, yet sometimes or should I say often the general conditions are just not right. Be it inadequate financial support, missing or inadequate teacher training that teaches the technical aspects but skip the didactic ones, ending up that e.g. Moodle is simply used to upload worksheets, i.e. ‘content management’ but missing the opportunities that the LMS Moodle actually has to offer.

I could endlessly continue, but it is also true what some participants say, it depends also on the single teacher and what he is willing to do. Well, let’s go for it. 

I would be also interested if somebody has an interesting app or ideas to offer regarding health & care, the subject which I am teaching.