By Mary Burns, Marianne Montalvo, and Rebecca Rhodes
Lessons from the Global
What can Mali, an impov- erished, land-locked West African nation, teach educators about mobile technology? Little to
nothing, one might think. Yet in Mali,
as in much of sub-Saharan Africa,
teachers and students are increasingly
using mobile technologies for learning
and teaching. While we in the United
States have debated whether, why,
and how to use mobile technologies
in class, many schools in the poorest
countries in the world—the so-called
developing world or Global South—
have taken up the use of mobile technologies with gusto despite formidable
obstacles.
Radios and MP3 players have an important role in bringing support to teachers in some of the planet’s most remote places.
Smartphones in Mali
Malian schools don’t have computers; indeed, the majority don’t even
have electricity. Most primary-school
students have never seen a computer,
much less used one in their classrooms. In such a context, where class
sizes can exceed 200 children and
where books and materials are lacking, any technology that is introduced
has to be portable so it can be charged
wherever power is available, simple to
use so that teachers can adopt it with
ease, and affordable enough to
be taken to scale.
In light of such challenges, the Education Development Center (EDC), a
global nonprofit organization that ad-dresses some of the world’s most urgent
challenges in education, implemented a
smartphone pilot program for teacher
training in 19 Malian schools. Using
smartphones equipped with a system
that allows for Internet access via a cellular network, teachers accessed science
What the World’s Poorest Nations Can Teach Us about Mobile
and language arts lesson plans EDC
created on a website called Pharekati
( http://sites.google.com/site/pharekati).
They used the text messaging features of
their smartphones to receive synchronous and asynchronous academic and
instructional support from EDC’s main
office in the capital, Bamako, and to report on their use.
Smartphones became extremely
popular with Malian teachers and
students. Virtually every teacher in
the program used their phones to access, implement, and report on the
lessons. More than half of the students
reported that smartphones made lessons easier to understand, more active, or more fun.
Though the smartphone pilot is
a first for West Africa, one signal is
very clear: Phones that enable teachers
to connect with relevant content, with
pedagogical guidance, and with their
peers can change the face of teaching
even in the most difficult classroom
conditions.
IRI and IAI in Honduras
Interactive radio instruction (IRI)
and its audio sibling, interactive audio
instruction (IAI), were developed in
California at Stanford University in
the 1970s and have contributed to
remarkable learning gains. Yet these
technologies are virtually unknown
in the United States.
