Authors:
Elba del Carmen Valderrama Bahamóndez, Albrecht Schmidt

Abstract

Education is a major concern in developing countries. We believe that new and emerging technologies offer hope in improving their educational systems. While the use of personal computers in developing countries is still very low, they have seen a widespread adoption of mobile phones in recent years. Since mobile phones have become small computing platforms, this inspired us to investigate their potential as educational tools. In this paper we report on a large survey (300 school children, 85 teachers) that was carried out in Panama to assess the status quo of technology use, as well as the initial ideas of the potential of using mobile phones in the context of school education. Results show that there is a high proliferation of mobile phones among school children, and that teachers and pupils were all able to envision using mobile phones for learning purposes. The results indicate that mobile devices have the potential to integrate into existing learning contexts, as well as enable new learning contexts.