These days almost all of our activities have been shifted to mobile phones. According to a survey, about 7.1 billion people are using mobile phones worldwide. Among them, 4.66 billion people use the internet on mobile phones. This ever-increasing number of mobile phones and internet users indicates that mobile apps are great tools to improve the learning outcomes of students. Thus, this article will discuss how we can use mobile phone apps for improving learning and educational outcomes. Furthermore, it will also discuss how important mobile phones are in transforming the educational system and how teachers can use them.
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Why are apps good for learning?
In this era, innovation affects almost every field, and learning is also one of them. Learning is a continuous process. It never ends, no matter how many degrees you have attained. Even each new day brings a lot of information and lesson for the one who thinks. The mobile phone, on the one hand, is a gadget of distraction. By flipping the picture, the same device becomes effective as a learning tool for students. Let us take an optimistic approach to see how mobile apps help you in learning more effectively.
1. It helps bring innovation to the traditional learning system
Educational mobile apps have a strong psychological effect on students. It helps students in grasping and understanding information more accurately than the traditional learning system. These apps offer students challenging tasks like quizzes, puzzles, and other educational games for better conceptual understanding.
2. Most comfortable means of improving learning outcomes
The mobile apps provide the most appropriate content to students. According to a survey by a coursework help service, an average student spends almost four hours and twenty-five minutes on the phone every single day. Thus, for improving the studying outcomes, mobile apps (educational) is the best and most comfortable tool.
3. Fast way of learning new skills or polishing existing one
Students often complain that they get bored while reading textbooks. The website search is also a slow solution to make learning fun. Moreover, the use of mobile phones is a fast, interesting and super-excited way of learning new skills and polishing existing ones with a single click.
4. Help improve problems solving abilities
There are many apps that help students in improving their problem-solving skills. Problems are inevitable, and success lies behind abilities to solve them. The use of mobile apps can help you in doing so. Fit Brains Trainer, Mind games, and other educational mobile apps teach students how to use an alternative approach to solve a problem.
What is the importance of mobile apps in education?
Mobile apps not only improve the learning outcomes of students but they have a remarkable effect on the whole educational system. During the lockdown, the education system has already faced a great online shift. As a result of the online shift of the educational system, there are a lot of lectures, slides, and other study supporting material freely available on the internet. But no online website or tutoring platform can perform faster than highly personalized mobile phone apps. Moreover, these apps have equal efficiency to store saved data for long periods of time. Following are some other points that reflect the importance to use mobile apps in education:
- Builds educational connections between global students
- It makes education more accessible and affordable for all students
- Boost student’s confidence by providing 24/7 assistance
- Best suit with interests of current social media generation
Do you think mobile apps can help you to learn?
Using mobile phone apps, if wrongly selected, wastes students’ time. But there are many features of mobile apps that can help you to learn more effectively. The following are some important features of these apps that help students in learning:
1. Fast file transfer
The file transfer between the students and teachers is vital to provide educational supporting material or notes. Moreover, the use of mobile apps for transferring files or notes helps students in sparing more time for self-study.
2. Session Recording
Sometimes due to any environmental discomfort, students often miss some points that affect their learning outcomes. The session recording is a factor that makes education more conformable for students. This feature optimizes students’ outcomes by getting back to the lecture material. For example, screen recording through mobile apps introduces the flip board approach.
3. Online Mock test practice
Exams are a vital component of a traditional and modern educational system. Thus, the use of mobile apps for mock exams’ conducting features helps students to cope with exam anxiety to optimize the performance for the on-board exam.
These are only a few features that help us in understanding the usefulness of mobile apps in the learning process. Moreover, there are many other ways that reflect that mobile apps make learning more effective and comfortable, like online screen sharing and flip card making. Thus, we can say that, yes, the use of mobile apps actually helps us in learning.
What do I still need to learn to use apps in teaching effectively?
Most of the mobile apps are easy to use. We often do not need some technical skills to use mobile apps for learning and teaching purpose. Still, many teachers think that online or mobile apps cannot produce better learning outcomes than a traditional class environment. Thus, the following are some practice tips that teachers can follow to use mobile apps for teaching effectively:
- Teaching is not a new process, but teaching through the mobile app is indeed an innovation. Thus, teachers should always remember that for online teaching, they must set some students’ goals and expectations.
- The most challenging part of teaching through apps is using a mixed teaching approach by contextualizing and integrating different teaching methods. Hence, for the use of mobile apps, the tutor should learn to use the combinatorial teaching approach.
- Apps cannot replace the importance of textbooks and notes in teaching methods. Thus, the use of mobile apps becomes more helpful when teachers learn how to make effective notes for screen sharing.
Consequently, the use of mobile apps aims to bring ease to the current learning process. A better learning outcome will have a positive effect on the educational system as a whole. Therefore, screen sharing, session recording, 24/7 assistance, and a dozen of more exciting features of the use of mobile apps make them an ideal educational tool.