Malis­sa Lara

Can you imag­ine do­ing a prac­tice test on a cel­lu­lar phone? Well, that thought has be­come a re­al­i­ty in the form of an in­ter­ac­tive mul­ti­ple choice Prin­ci­ples of Busi­ness (POB) prac­tice test.

De­vel­oped by An­dre Cado­gan, The Math­Mo­bile POB ap­pli­ca­tion en­ables learn­ing us­ing mo­bile phones. How­ev­er, the Tran­quil­li­ty Sec­ondary School teacher said with these "tech-friend­ly" tests it's not on­ly cel­lu­lar phones which can be used. Stu­dents can use their smart­phones, and mul­ti-game de­vices, just to name a few. Cado­gan said, "In years to come even book stores will have to get a sub­scrip­tion to deal with mo­bile tech­nol­o­gy." He said an­oth­er goal was "to fa­cil­i­tate learn­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties of­fered by mo­bile tech­nol­o­gy where any sort of learn­ing can hap­pen when the learn­er is not at a fixed, pre­de­ter­mined lo­ca­tion." Cado­gan, who cre­at­ed a Math­Over­all Shape and Geom­e­try self-in­struc­tion­al pro­gramme, said the world is go­ing mo­bile.

These tests fit in well in this high-speed world as the test mod­ule of­fers in­stant feed­back and as­sess­ment. "The test ac­cepts your an­swers, scores them and gives feed­back. "It is for stu­dents or po­ten­tial stu­dents who are read­ing for the POB CSEC ex­am," Cado­gan said. The Mo­bile Tech­nol­o­gy Re­search Stu­dent at Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T said mo­bile learn­ing has the po­ten­tial to do much more than de­liv­er cours­es, or parts of cours­es. He said it in­cludes de­liv­er­ing ed­u­ca­tion or learn­ing, fos­ter­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion or col­lab­o­ra­tion, con­duct­ing as­sess­ments or eval­u­a­tions and pro­vid­ing ac­cess to per­for­mance sup­port or knowl­edge.

Break­through

There is help on the way for all stu­dents and Cado­gan said all mul­ti­ple choice ex­ams can now be ad­min­is­tered via mo­bile de­vices. With the in­te­gra­tion of Short Mes­sage Ser­vice (SMS), tests can be done and the scores will be sent via SMS to a teacher. "In oth­er words, teach­ers now can trans­fer a mul­ti­ple choice ex­am to a mo­bile de­vice via Blue­tooth, in which each stu­dent will then take the ex­am us­ing a mo­bile de­vice." The soft­ware that runs the ex­am will ac­cept the re­spons­es from each stu­dent, score and give feed­back.

The scores or the re­sults will be sent via SMS to a Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem or to the teacher's mo­bile de­vice. "More­over the teacher does not have to use the tra­di­tion­al way of cor­rect­ing ex­am­i­na­tions, with a pen, notwith­stand­ing the amount of time tak­en to ac­tu­al­ly cor­rect these test pa­pers," said Cado­gan. Nowa­days, mo­bile phones have a large base of users, rich mul­ti­me­dia ca­pa­bil­i­ties, and are linked by high­ly avail­able com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work. This rev­o­lu­tion re­moves time and lo­ca­tion bound­aries mak­ing any­where, any­time learn­ing pos­si­ble.

?re­quire­ments

�2 Blue­tooth or USB ca­ble at­tached to a PC

�2 Must be trans­ferred and in­stalled via PC to a mo­bile de­vice

�2 Can­not be trans­ferred from mo­bile phone to mo­bile phone.

De­vices that can be used

�2 Mo­bile phones

�2 Smart­phones

�2 Per­son­al me­dia play­ers

�2 Per­son­al dig­i­tal as­sis­tants

?Math Mo­bile is free of charge and it will be avail­able for down­load via rapid share at http://rapid­share.com/files/270233193/mi­dlet.jar or con­tact An­dre Cado­gan via e-mail bpgueze@ya­hoo.com