Cloud Messaging to Instantly Reach Students During Learning

Abstract

Interacting and communicating is an important aspect of creating better relationships and cooperation where participants exchange experiences with each other, know each other and their needs better, contributing in creating a more productive environment where everyone benefits. Communication and interaction is highly important in teaching and learning process. Even though face to face communication is very effective, sometimes it becomes very difficult to achieve, especially when we have to contact and communicate with many people at the same time like in a teacher-student relationship. In this regard technology can help to facilitate the process. Taking in consideration that in the recent years mobile devices usage has experienced an exponential growth, they are becoming the perfect tool to reach users and directly contact them, personally or even in groups, anytime and everywhere.

This paper focuses on the potentials of push notifications and study Google Cloud Messaging, its architecture components, their interactions and the main advantages that makes this technology an appropriate solution for supporting massage transfer to mobile users. We introduce a specific implementation that uses GCM to transfer questions with possible answers, from teachers to multiple students and test the connection performance. This implementation can be used also for other types of teacher-student communication and also student to student communication.

Keywords: Mobile Learning, Google Cloud Messaging, Push Notification, Real Time Communication