Smartphones aid college students

Jenny Starkie takes her cell phone everywhere.

When the senior nursing major wakes up at 5 a.m. to prepare for another long day of clinicals at the Medical Center of Central Georgia in Macon, 33 miles away from her apartment, she turns to quiet her iPhone on the nightstand beside her. The smartphone is her alarm clock, her calendar, her radio and her grocery list. It is integral to her daily routine and even an important diagnostic tool she will rely on throughout the day.Though most students rely on smartphones heavily for social and communication purposes, this educational use isn’t uncommon. Already a plethora of applications exist to increase in-class and out-of-class potential, applications like Nursing Central used by Starkie and several other nursing majors at Georgia College.

“(Nursing Central) has a drug guide, lab book, and medical dictionary on it. They come in handy by letting me look up what a drug is about and the side effects when I don’t know what a drug is…I also use it all the time too look up diseases on the dictionary which tells me a brief rundown on the illness,” Starkie said.

The app includes a database of 5,000 drugs and more than 60,000 dictionary terms. It can be used to look up the range values of labs such as white blood cell count or to look up the side effects of unfamiliar drugs.

While Starkie subtly uses her iPhone at the hospital and never takes it out in patients’ rooms, there are some instances where whipping out her phone is necessary.

“At clinical last week a student and parent came into the school nurse’s office and was talking about this disease that me nor the school nurse had ever heard of,” Starkie said. “I was able to pull it up on my app and we were able to find out actually what it was and what we needed to be keeping an eye out on.”

Generation X is quickly adjusting the mass amount of information that can be accessed on smartphones and schools are catching on as well. The University of Louisville School of Medicine licenses the medical app software for students to use on their own phones in the classroom, in the field and on their own time. The software gives access to medical dictionary, drug interaction, drug prices, dosing, and information on diseases and is taking the place of multiple reference books and prescription pads.

According to Frank Lowney, Projects Coordinator for Digital Innovation Group at GCSU, mobile learning is on the rise. Lowney, whose research and work is centered on mobile learning, is backed by the 2010 Horizon Report that identifies mobile computing time-to-adoption as one year or less. He suggests students take advantage of iTunes U, which is stocked with free content that can be accessed through the iTunes app and works with other applications like iBooks.

“If you are an independent learner, have iTunes U and a mobile device, you can download (lectures, ebooks, and pdfs) to your mobile device and learn anywhere and anytime,” Lowney said. “And not only anywhere and anytime but also independently of any network because it downloads to the device. So if I download an ebook, if I download a lecture, it’s all here on my mobile device and I can consult it when I have few minutes of downtime.”

Like television, radio and many media before it, smartphones are evolving quickly to encompass a variety of needs.

“The mobile device isn’t just for communication; it’s for edification,” Lowney said. “If you have a mobile device and you are a student you can manage pretty much anything– email, web surfing, calendar, all of your learning needs, all of your social needs. It’s really hard to imagine something that can’t be handled.”

With the extensive amount of applications available and the diffusion of smartphones, it is hard to imagine what aspect of life the smart phone doesn’t have covered. Worldwide touch-screen smart phones experienced a 108.9 percent market share growth from 2008 to 2009 according to Canalys research, and as of May 2010 half of adults with cell phones have applications and 29 percent use them. According to Pew Research Center. And when it comes to counting applications, currently over 250,000 applications are available for the iPhone and 30,000 on the android market leaving plenty of app potential for every class fathomable.

Convert – The Unit Calculator converts area, currency, energy, speed, and many more mathematical variables. CliffNotes summarizes plots, analyzes characters, and maps out characters’ family trees. Google Sky Map searches the sky and reveals stars, planets, and constellations above you. And MyGrades organizes assignment grades and calculates the average grade for each class you’re taking.

Junior computer science and mathematics major Scott Wofford frequently uses Quick Graph, a graphing calculator app, and Wolfram Alpha, a mega-calculator app, as aids to his own schoolwork as well as tutoring others at Georgia Military College.

“When I took Calc 3– the thing about Calc 3 is that it is really, really hard because it is that it is in three dimensions, so it is hard to visualize because you can’t draw it… (Quick Graph) would do 3D design so I (could) see the design of it,” Wofford said.

But as often as smartphones can prove beneficial they can also be distraction.

“Just like any other tool, tools are amoral,” Lowney said. “They can be used for good or evil.”

Many students admit to relying on their smartphones as a source of entertainment during class, and with the variety of games available on the app market they don’t have to search long to find one or more that suit their gaming tastes.

“I have a few (gaming applications). One of my big ones was Angry Birds. It’s the bomb but as soon as I beat it, I just kind of fizzled away. Another was Cut the Rope. It was a very quick game. The last one I played was Planes vs. Zombies,” Wofford said,

These game applications fill our idle time as well. Moving trains into their color coded stations, flicking angry birds at two-dimensional structures, and tossing crumpled paper into waste bins starve off our boredom. When it comes to that down time between classes, shuttle stops, etc., students more often turn to the entertainment portion of smartphones over the educational possibilities.

Smartphones, however, are only in their infancy.

“The implementation of the smart phone technology is just starting,” Wofford said. “Yes, we are playing games on it now and taking video calls on it now but in three years what is it going to be used for?”

Posted by Rebecca Burns on Jan 27 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.