Apps for coffee addicts

“Coffee Finder is designed to find the closest place for you to get some coffee when you need your caffeine fix.”

That is my app 🙂

At first glance these coffee apps I found on the ‘makeuseof’ blog, seems to have nothing in common with learning, but as a previous student, studying part-time with the OU,  I know how much coffee can support learning ;-). I think without my daily dose of coffee I would have not made it through my study.

But let’s get serious again. What do I take along from the first two weeks about mobile apps.

1. There is much discussion about mobile apps, a lot of lectures and presentations, but I am not sure if it is nothing  but smoke and mirrors
2. the majority of students own a mobile phone and they are more than eager to use it if schools would allow it 😉
3. teachers (I can speak only for my school department in a vocational school) are either reluctant to allow mobile phones in their lessons or they have no didactic concept how best to apply it in their teaching and learning process (I belong to the latter)
4. mobile apps respectively mobile phones are mainly used

• as service) apps – like the canteen app or information apps about university courses are quite popular, a
• for geotagging or geocaching
• staying in contact during a field trip, in case somebody get’s lost
• for quick Internet searches
• tacking photos for projects
• and of course students are using it for social network or listening to music, mainly without the allowance of the school 😉

My list is of course not representative and does not really focus in particular on mobile apps about more on the possible use of mobile phones.

However I agree with Martin Ebner, E-Learning Blog, 26. April 2012 who claims that

“Mobile learning does not aim for learning with the mobile, but to use the device to support your personal information management.”

Susan Lucille Davis introduced in the Getting smart blog ‘After School: 5 Apps Your Students Are Using When You’re Not Looking’. The ‘Anti-Social’ app and the ‘Write or die’ app serves to keep students focused on learning.

The Anti-social app locks you out of Twitter, Facebook, and other distractions you may select. The only way you can get back into these sites is to reboot your computer. Pretty cool, but I am not sure if students went straight back to these SNS (social network sites) or if the really return to homework.

The ‘Write or die’ app serves a similar purpose to keep of procrastination. If you stop writing at the rate you have set for yourself because you become distracted by daydreaming or because you are shutting down because you are overwhelmed by the load of assignments on your desk,  then you can be nudged gently by a pop-up window reminder, commanded back to your task by an annoying sound. Susan state that in Kamikaze mode, the written words will be erasing themselves if you do not write quickly enough and that she is a little afraid to ask what Electric Shock Mode will do.

Well, that write and die app would have served me well during my study, although in Kamikaze mode all my words would have been erased by my rate of writing. Sometimes I needed more than an hour to type a small paragraph – typical writers block, but of course no procrastination 😉