Mobile Devices for Literary Education in Teacher Training: An Innovative Experience with M-Learning

What is it about?

The emergence of mobile devices has piqued researchers’ interest in the educational possibilities of these electronic tools. This work, using a case-study methodology, presents an innovative project with m-learning focused on literary education in higher education. The project—creating a video review of a children’s book—was carried out with sixty-eight students majoring in early childhood education. To evaluate the effectiveness of this project, the final tasks were considered together with the instructor’s and students’ perception. An instrument was designed to analyse the videos, and two questionnaires were distributed to elicit students’ and instructor’s perceptions. Findings reveal the flexibility of m-learning and its adequacy for literary education in teacher training. The students learned to select and evaluate children’s books and acquired some knowledge of children’s literature. The task involved searching for information, critical thinking, analysis and synthesis, decision-making, autonomy, development of communicative competence, creativity, and teamwork skills and helped to familiarise students with m-learning. Finally, weaknesses detected suggest that more taught sessions are required and that more attention should be paid to oral skills. Besides, it is necessary to incentivize the use of the task blog and to foster social interaction.

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Why is it important?

This work focuses on the use of m-learning in the literary education of future teachers, a research line that has been scarcely explored. It is part of a project of innovation carried out in the University of Oviedo (Spain).

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