Abstract
The history of science education reform has been fundamentally centered around science curriculum development and implementation. The advent of mobile technologies has necessitated a re-examination of how students could better learn science through these 21st century tools. Conventional teaching materials may not prepare students to learn the inquiry way and to become self-directed and social learners who could learn "everywhere and all the time (seamlessly)" using mobile technologies. This paper is based on our first year of work in our mobile learning research project in transforming primary three science lessons into a "mobilized" curriculum for a classroom context in which students routinely use mobile technologies. Using an exemplar fungi topic, we discuss our approach as well as experiences in deconstructing and reconstructing an existing curriculum through a co-design approach with teachers in a Singapore local school. In doing so, we make a contribution to the methodology for developing mobilized science curricula for in-class learning that also extends to out-of-class learning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1504-1523 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Computers and Education |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2010 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported in part by the Singapore National Research Foundation (Grant #: NRF2007IDM-IDM005-021 ). We thank the experimental school, teachers, and students for their collaboration. We thank other project team members for their inputs to enhance the paper, especially Yancy Toh for her editing. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback to improve the quality of the paper.
Keywords
- Computer-mediated communication
- Curriculum development
- Elementary education
- Mobile learning
- Science Education
- Teaching/learning strategies
