Highlights from NYSCATE Mobile Learning Conference: Androids in Education Breakout Session

This is part two of a multi-part entry summarizing some highlights from NYSCATE's Mobile Learning Conference in March.

Androids in Education was presented by Ryan Mahoney from the Research and Development team at Mohawk Regional Information Center (moric.org.)

The MORIC has been devoted to research on different tablets for the past year. Here are some thinking points from Ryan's presentation.

-We're "Trending Mobile": consumer use and demand of laptops are on the downward trend. By 2014, tablet and mobile use will exceed laptop for internet access.
-Chris Dede's interesting observation: you can own a device that knows who you are, who you like to learn with, and where you are...and these devices are taken away when they go to school.
-a particular ACU professor, during a college course, saw the use of Blackboard increase with use of Ipads over laptops.
-Devices that MORIC evaluated- Kindle Fire, Asus EEE Transformer, Samsung Galaxy; all have different price points and management flaws. iTunes has far and away the most apps at 500,000+. The Samsung Galaxy is the next most-popular of the tablets and also supports Flash.
-These Android devices are not just for content consumption; content creation (multimedia) is now feasible.
-Management: currently, there are a lot of mobile device management vendors in the marketplace; “Airwatch” was mentioned as one of MORIC's favorites. Some management considerations and questions that MORIC used to evaluate these MDMs (mobile device management systems):

-register bulk or individually?
-remote wipe device?
-define max devices per user?
-regulate OS and device types?
-push wi-fi settings?
-restrict SD card usage?
-set compliance rules?
-restrict Native Apps?
-Blacklist Marketplace Apps?
-Silently remove apps? (Samsung devices) (feature specific to AirWatch)
-Secure document locker?
-control document access?
-push bookmarks and web clips?
-silently push locally developed apps?
-view device and network info?
-audit installed apps and content?
-locate device through GPS?
-view call and text message history?

And of course, the major points of worry:

-digital equity
-physical security
-misue of device
-CIPA filtering
-expectation of privacy
-educational records

Follow MORIC's mindshare and research/development efforts around Android devices at moric.org.