Development of Teaching Material Using a Cellphone to Connect to the Internet - For Collecting Liverworts to Use Them for Observation Activities in the Classroom and in the Field

Abstract

Recently, teachers have begun to focus on web teaching materials that would be effective in class activities. So, we have developed web teaching material which is accessible by a cellphone through the Internet. It helps teachers and students to collect liverworts in the field. We could refer to the following four advantages of the teaching material for cell phones. 1) Possibility of collecting liverworts throughout the year, 2) Possibility of using the teaching material anywhere, even in field activities, 3) Relation to classroom activities, 4) High accessibility for teachers and students. We compared this teaching material for cell phones with the other teaching materials. We found other advantages and disadvantages to it. As for advantages, the cellphone is easy to carry, teachers and students are able to exchange information and research data anywhere, and they can use the material provided in the classroom or in field activities. One of the major disadvantages is the limited memory of cell phones to download a heavy page from a website. In addition, as the markup languages have not yet been standardized among Japanese cellphone companies, we needed to develop different file adapted to each different cellphone company.