Digital technologies play an important role in our daily lives. Smartphones and tablet computers are very common worldwide and are available for everybody from a very early age. This trend offers the opportunity to track digital usage data for psychological and educational research purposes. The current paper introduces two research projects, the…

In this column, I discuss a soundscape composition activity that I implemented with primary/elementary music classes. During this activity, students used the iPad app, iMovie, to record, organize and edit sound to accompany photos of artworks that they had created. Overall, I found iMovie to be a useful app for music composition with general music…

Measuring the similarity of stimuli is of great interest to a variety of social scientists. Spatial arrangement by dragging and dropping "more similar" targets closer together on the computer screen is a precise and efficient method to measure stimulus similarity. We present Qualtrics-spatial arrangement method (Q-SpAM), a feature-rich…

When teaching undergraduate biology courses, developing engaging activities which allow students to learn using a hands-on pedagogy can provide impactful learning moments for students. This activity helps students make connections between lecture content on environmental issues, e.g., the use of microplastics (MPs) and their own day-to-day…

A smartphone-based digital imaging method has been successfully introduced in an undergraduate laboratory class to quantify fluoride ions in water. Students first synthesized the chemosensor (E)-2-(1-(6-nitro-2-oxo-2H-chromen-3-yl)ethylidene)-N-phenylhydrazine-1-carbothioamide (CT) via an eco-friendly and green microwave-assisted protocol and…

Children like to play with smartphones and other touchscreen-based devices, and suitably developed apps can help in entertaining, nurturing, and educating children. For the last three years, the authors have been studying how children interact with smartphones and other touchscreen-based devices. They assert that knowing the capabilities of…

It is not enough to simply post text in social media messages. Tweets with images garner three times more engagement, such as through likes, retweets, follows, clicks, and comments. Social media messages without accompanying visuals are a missed opportunity. This article describes 10 simple tools and accompanying techniques for creating attractive…

Estimote Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons deployed throughout a university campus enabled the creation of interactive tours for prospective and accepted students at Fall and Spring open house events. By configuring their mobile devices with an app to detect the beacons' signals, participants could view webpages containing information based on…

The use of smartphones is increasingly gaining popularity in education. Students and teachers can determine scientific concepts using smartphones equipped with sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS -- a navigation system that provides location information) and orientation (a device to measure coordinates according to a reference frame).…

The use of smartphones in experimental physics is by now widely accepted and documented. PASCO scientific's smart cart, in combination with student-owned smartphones and free apps, has opened up a new universe of low-cost experiments that have traditionally required cumbersome and expensive equipment. In this paper we demonstrate the simplicity,…

iPads are becoming increasingly prevalent in schools and offer significant potential as both a compositional and pedagogical tool in general music classes. In this article, I discuss a composition activity that I implemented with general primary/elementary music classes in Australia. This activity involved using iPads, namely the apps iMovie and…

Two key ingredients for developing language skills are output and interaction. The use of computer-mediated communication (often referred to as "CMC") tools and of social networking sites (SNSs) offer a valuable resource to English language teachers and learners who wish to extend learning beyond the classroom walls, especially as…

In this work, we propose an interesting combination of the Atwood machine and Galileo's inclined plane to study quantitatively kinematics with a smartphone and the phyphox app. For this purpose, we use the optical stopwatch function, based on the photosensor of the smartphone. The choice of phyphox app has some advantages for presenting the…

Educational leaders, have schedules full of responsibilities, meetings, and events. With all of those urgent demands, it can be a challenge to find the time to fuel one's passions and grow professionally. This article presents Voxer, a free mobile app that allows users to quickly leave voice messages for another individual or group of individuals.…

There are already several articles describing ways to teach physics using smartphone apps, but what are some experiments you can perform immediately without downloading any additional software? In the spirit of increasing the amount of hands-on activities each of us is doing, and to give us backup activities when you have a few extra minutes of…