Foghlaim Ón Nuatheicneolaíocht / Learning through new Technologies
The FÓN project examined the use of mobile phones and networked computers for teaching, learning and assessing Irish at post-primary level. Work on FÓN was divided into three phases:
MALL (Phase 1): Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (2007) (pdf)
FÓN, Phase 2 (2008/9) (pdf)
FÓN, Phase 3 (2009/10) (pdf)
So how were mobile phones and networked computers used in MALL and FÓN?
The mobile phones were used in three ways:
To send vocabulary SMS to students daily
To facilitate students to dial up to a voice-response system where they left recorded responses to their teacher's questions.
To facilitate students to dial up to a voice-chat with another student in their class, in the same school or in another school. The chat was based on a teacher's task which the students received when they paired up with their chat partner.
The networked computers were used to facilitate online text-chat between students in a secure and teacher-monitored area. Students logged in to the system and were paired with an anonymous chat partner from their own class, from a class in the same school or a class in another school. The text-chat centred around a teacher designated task or stimulus (for example, a video or photograph).
Teachers had access to a secure online interface where they could listen back to students' responses, provide feedback, set up new chat sessions and monitor student progress.
Students had a similar online interface, where they could access all of their recorded responses and chats as well as any teacher feedback associated with them. Students could listen to sample answers, view the SMSs they had received and log in to their text-chat area.