Does anyone remember the days when your teacher would smugly tell you that you needed to learn how to do these sums in your head because, “You wouldn’t always be carrying a calculator around with you?”
Well, regardless of whether you had that experience or not, the teachers in question are now proven wrong by the calculator apps of all modern iOS or Android smartphones, which are semi-permanent attachments to our bodies these days.
It’s a satisfying turn of events for those who remember being told this, but it’s also a sign of things to come in the education world. Smartphones and tablets, along with their accompanying apps, are making noticeable inroads into classrooms and education across the entire learning spectrum.
But how do these apps help each age level? Well, Kumulos, in our quest to be the most helpful backend as a service platform ever, have put together a short breakdown of how apps are making themselves known at every level of learning.
Pre-School
Tablet apps, especially those on the iPad and other tablets, have found a large audience in pre-school learning. By using colourful, vibrant designs and by gamifying the learning process, apps like Coop Phonics (an app that teaches reading through parents and children playing a story together) are making waves.
It makes sense that tablet apps would be the ones dominating in this market. They have the space and power to allow for big, vibrant worlds that draw children in and also have much more screen space to allow for the less accurate dexterity of younger children.
Coop Phonics also shows the potential of these apps to bring parent and child together and allow the parent a very active part in their child’s education, something that was difficult to do before in a way that would keep children interested.
School
By school, most children these days are already becoming tech literate in a number of computing fields, but most commonly through a PC of some kind and also a smartphone.
Educational apps in classrooms are attempting to capitalise on that already present knowledge by creating class time where all the students are provided tablets to use these educational apps that are teaching them parts of their learning syllabus.
On the one hand, this has great potential advantages for the students as they’re learning in a way that they’re very familiar with and is more likely to engage them than the traditionally dry school teaching style.
On the other, teachers are worried that they currently have very little control over what pupils are doing on these apps, and they can’t access data about how well individual pupils are doing like they can with more traditional teaching programs on PCs.
With older computer teaching programs, teachers can view what pupils are doing and also track their progress, as well as stop them misusing the program or computer; whilst apps, being mostly stand alone, do not offer this same supervisory power.
This worry is changing, however, with the introduction of LanSchool Technologies’ (a Utah based educational software company) EdApp certification. It allows app makers to embed code that lets teachers access the classroom’s mobile devices as they are being used by the pupils.
It is a very new development though, with only 5 apps, 4 of which belonging to the same developer (PalaSoftware) being approved for EdApp certification. This is likely to change as time goes on though, and we at the Kumulos Mobile Backend think that there is a bright future for this kind of classwide app learning in schools.
University
Higher education is where we’ve started to see an emphasis on apps being used to empower students rather than merely as teaching aides (although these apps do exist for some high schools now).
Many universities now have their own app which, built on, say, the Blackboard teaching platform, allows students to keep up to date with their classes, timetables, lectures, course work, grades and other useful information related to their course in the university right at their fingertips.
This is obviously great for students as they no longer need to check a computer at home to see if the latest lecture notes are online, or whether the required reading has changed, they can just bring up the app and see it wherever they are. It allows the student constant access to the things that are most important to their course, which in turn empowers them to learn in the most effective way possible.
It’s not just the students that are benefitting from the app ecosystem in university though. More and more universities are being inspired to make their own apps, some lecturers are even starting to make apps for their individual class subjects, or universities are creating competitions where they challenge students and staff to create the best mobile app for the university to use.
Teachers
Apps aren’t just helping just students though. There are many apps out there that are helping teachers with their heavy workloads by innovating and streamlining how they can organise and work with their classes.
Teacher’s Assistant is a good example of this. It’s an iPad app that lets teachers keep track of student behaviour by an easy to use interface that tracks infarctions or achievements of individual pupils and lets the teacher build up and overall view of how the student is performing in real time. Reports can be generated and instantly sent to other teachers or parents by e-mail.
This is a great example of how apps can simplify what is quite a complex task (behaviour monitoring in classrooms) and turn a job that requires a lot of input and time on the teacher’s behalf and reduce it significantly.
The flexibility of apps means that they don’t all have to be tackling as important issues as classroom behaviour.
Mathematical Formulas is a small app that lets the user, usually a teacher, quickly reference a wide variety of mathematical formulae over a range of subjects. Students are (in)famous for throwing curveball questions at teachers that they can’t immediately answer, but this app helps teachers quickly and easily solve even the trickiest trick questions posed by thier class.
The freedom and relative ease of app development these days means that anyone can give it go, no matter their programming level, and in the world of education this is more evident than most.
However, many of these apps still need access to mobile backends of some description to help them run effectively, and that’s where Kumulos comes in.
Any app, any OS, any time, anywhere, if you’ve got an app that needs a mobile backend, we’re your guys. An iOS app for iPad and iPhone that needs a backend database to store user data for a teacher to access? No problem. Android app that uses geolocation to help kids see how they stack up compared to those in their local area? We’ve got it covered. What about if you’re just a bit stuck and need someone to get you back on track? Tech support is just a free sign up away.
So why not give your educational app project a boost today by signing up for free to Kumulos Backend as a Service?
