42 personalized to her, or will extend
the learner‟s repertoire of approaches to learning such as learning how to learn. It can also be demonstrated by providing
empirical evidence of effective outcomes of the pedagogic approach including the digital material. The other way is by satisfying a number of the characteristic
of good learning learner agency; learner autonomy; encourages metacognitive including high order thinking; enables or encourages collaboration. The last
way is by providing authentic learning that refers to authentic situations outside school and to the learners‟ perspective and situation.
The sixth principle is formative assessment that pedagogy should provide formative; assessment that is primarily aimed at improving learning. This can be
achieved in many ways. The first is by providing rapid feedback that helps the learner to see their improvement in learning. The second is by providing
opportunities of peer assessment and self-assessment with appropriate understanding of the criteria or standards of performance required.
The seventh principle is summative assessment that is used to grade students for guidance as to, or selection for, future educational or work
opportunities. The summative assessment must be valid and reliable i.e. assess what is aimedat in the objectives and give consistent result for particular learners,
comprehensible by teachers, learners, parents, able to deal with a range of achievement levels, and free from adverse emotional impact on the learner.
The eight principles are coherence, consistency, and transparency. The pedagogy must be internally coherent and consistent in the way the objectives,
content, student activity and assessment match to each other. It must be open and accessible in its design. This implies that the components in the learning media
43 should each match and the match should be transparent for example the activities
must be consistent with the objectives and the assessment should assess these objectives.
The ninth principle is ease of use. It means that the learning media should be open and accessible, intuitive and not requiring guidance in use, the provision
of appropriate guidance for the learner and teacher for the learner, it should not require extensive training or instruction that are not part of educational aims. The
learning media should also have appropriate assumption about the ICT skills of users.
The last principle is cost-effectiveness. Technology solutions need to be justifiable, affordable and the cost sustainable. Using learning technology is not
cheap option for enhancing educational opportunity, broadening choice and raising standards. The investment needs to be justified in terms of cost benefits
and savings through efficiencies of scale, or in terms of affordance of pedagogic opportunities and enrichment, or in meeting educational needs and goals which
are not achievable in other ways.
b. The Characteristics of MALL The main characteristics of mobile learning according to Ogata and Yano
2005 as cited in Viberg and Gronlund 2012 are permanency, accessibility, immediacy, interactivity, situating of instructional activities. While the definitions
of mobile learning according to Sharples et al. 2007 is that not only the technology which can mobile but also the people can mobile, so the definition of
mobile learning m-Learning is a process of coming to know through
44 conversation across multiple contexts among people and personal interactive
technologies. The technology to assist in the process includes any kind of handled mobile devices such as cell phones, Personal Digital Assistants PDAs, smart
phones, pads, pods, etc.
9. Android
Android is a very well-known operating system recently. In modern society, Android has been used by many vendors of mobile devices such as
Samsung, Oppo, Lenovo, Asus, etc.
a. The Nature of Android Android as an operating system is now well-developed seen by the huge
numbers of mobile devices which use Android platform as their Operating System Os. Meng Lee 2012 states that Android is a mobile system that is based on
modified version of Linux. Android is owned by Google since 2005 and Google then took over its development work and team. It is an open and free operating
system, anyone who wants to use Android can only download the full Android source code. Further, Android offers a unified approach to application
development. Android developers need only develop for Android then their application should be able to run in numerous different devices as long as the
devices are powered using Android. The Android application which now has various types are the most important part for the success of smartphones p. 2.
AFORN was developed in the form of Android application which can only runned in mobile phones with Android as the operating system.
45 b. Android Features
Android is an operating system which is used in smart phone and PC tablet. It has similar function like Symbian in Nokia, iOS in Apple and Blackberry
OS. Recently, any gadgets with Android OS are very popular. Meng Lee 2012 explains the definition of Android. Android is a mobile operating system that is
based on modified version of Linux. It was originally developed by a startup of the same name, Android, Inc. One advantage of Android is that Android offers a
unified approach to application development. The developers of Android need only develop it and their application should be able to run on numerous different
devices, as long as the devices are powered by using Android p. 2. The Android as seen in Meng Lee 2012 supports some features. The features of Android are
in the following table.
Table 2.7 Features of Android Adapted from Meng Lee 2012
a. Storage – uses SQLite, a lightweight relational database, for data storage.
b. Connectivity – support GSMEDGE, IDEN, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS,
Bluetooth includes A2DP and AVRCP, Wi-Fi, LTE, and WiMAX c. Messaging
– support both SMS and MMS d. Web browser
– based on the open source WebKit, together with Chrome‟s V8 JavaScript engine
e. Media support – includes support for the following media: H.263, H.264 in
3GP or MP4 container, MPEG-4 SP, AMR, AMR-WB in 3GP container, AAC, HE-AAC in MP4 or 3GP container, MP3 MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, JPEG,
PNG, GIF, and BMP f. Hardware support
– Accelerometer Sensor, Camera, Digital Compass,
46 Proximity Sensor, and GPS
g. Multi-touch supports multi-touch screens h. Multi-tasking
– supports multi-tasking applications i. Flash support
– Android 2.3 supports Flash 10.1. j. Tethering
– supports sharing of Internet connections as a wiredwireless hotspot
c. MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology App Inventor MIT App Inventor is a blocks-based programming tool that allows
everyone, even novices, to start programming and build fully functional apps for Android devices. Newcomers to App Inventor can have their first app up and
running in an hour or less, and can program more complex apps in significantly less time than with more traditional, text-based languages. Initially developed by
Professor Hal Abelson and a team from Google Education while Hal was on sabbatical at Google, App Inventor runs as a Web service administered by staff at
MIT‟s Center for Mobile Learning - a collaboration of MIT‟s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory CSAIL and the MIT Media Lab. MIT App
Inventor supports a worldwide community of nearly two million users representing
195 countries worldwide. The tool‟s more than 85 thousand active weekly users have built more than 4.7 million android apps. An open-source tool
that seeks to make both programming and app creation accessible to a wide range of audiences
http:appinventor.mit.eduexploreabout-us.htmlNovember 5 .
AFORN was programmed by using MIT App Inventor. In MIT App
Inventor there are some features used to develop an application; User Interface, Layout, Media, Drawing and Animation, Sensors, Social, Storage, and
47
Connectivity. But some features which are used in developing the application are only User Interface, Layout, Media, and Social. User Interface provides some
elements to design the layout for each screen for example: button, textbox,
listview, image, label, etc. Layout is used to do arrangement since it consists of
table arrangement, vertical arrangement and horizontal arrangement. Since the
AFORN contains file in MP3 file, feature Media is used in building the application. Social feature contains sharing element to make group discussion
section in the application.
Figure 2.2 The Design of A Screen in AFORN Seen in MIT App Inventor
Figure 2.2 above shows the home page of MIT App Inventor and its Designer page. In this part, the researcher designed the layout of each screen in
AFORN. In general, MIT App Inventor contains two parts; Designer and Blocks. Designer is a part where the researcher designed every screen in the AFORN and
its component, whereas in the Blocks page, the researcher programmed the blocks
48 for each screen in the AFORN so that the AFORN can be operated in mobile
phones with Android Os. The following Figure 2.3 presents blocks in one screen.
