Mobile learning: a new step to engage trainee teachers

Laptops, smartphones and tablets are a great opportunity to promote interesting new educational experiences. Teachers and students have nowadays a major opportunity not only to teach but also to learn with mobile devices that can enable relevant cognitive experiences. We are all conscious of the need to prepare our students for the real world, therefore we must provide them with real world skills. Schools and teachers must understand the advantages of using technology in the classroom, including mobile devices, to teach and learn formal contents taking into account the current world demands. We believe that it is necessary to show how teachers can use mobile devices to engage their students in the learning process. We think the best way to do this is to demonstrate to teachers, including trainee teachers, how they can use a set of virtual applications (apps) to teach the contents of any subject in order to promote an engagement in learning. In that sense, we are going to describe a study with trainee teachers to whom we (as a supervisor) presented a set of apps. During this research (which lasted for about six months), we taught them how they could use these apps in their classes. At the end of this action plan, we collected the students' opinions through an online questionnaire. We tried to gauge their understanding regarding their perceptions on the use of mobile learning in education. The results obtained showed evidence that the participants had enjoyed learning to use the different apps and had felt confident to use mobile devices in order to increase the learning outcomes in their own curricular content.