Use of Mobile Technologies in Personal Learning Environments of Intercultural Contexts: Individual and Group Tasks

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the analysis of the personal learning environments (PLE) used individually and in groups by fifth grade primary education students. The main objective was to determine if the use of mobile technologies in the students’ PLEs encouraged their school integration and learning in intercultural communities. For this, a content analysis of the students’ responses to an ad hoc interview was carried out, with a content validity index of 0.89. The students represented their answers using 41 concept maps in the individual tasks and 5 in the group tasks, which were analyzed with the Nvivo software in its latest version. The results show the categorization of the students’ responses in three dimensions: read, make/reflection and relationship. Among the main conclusions, it was obtained that, in both types of tasks, the strategies and tools that fostered intercultural relationships, intercultural education and communication between the students, and therefore school integration, are mostly linked to the use of mobile technologies applications, such as Wikipedia, the internet, Word, PowerPoint, social networks and YouTube, although it is essential to develop more studies to have more data to understand the phenomenon in depth.