Learning Software

Not long ago I was catching up with one of my old high schools friends who is now teaching high school English.  We were catching up about what we're currently working on and the lessons we each have been learning in the beginning years of employment.  And then we got to talking about educational technology and the like (it was a pretty easy transition given our circumstances) and she asked me about the problem of cell phones in the classroom.  Immediately, she noted that it was becoming more of a burden to write up students and collect the cell phones constantly.  

So obviously the solution is to find ways to use the phones positively to engage students, and there are hundreds of examples and ideas available online of teachers doing just that.  The iPhone in particular has gotten a lot of attention from edtech bloggers and tweeters for the simplicity of the user interface and the access of resources available (both apps and webapps).  

Which is really great if your students have iPhones.

A really good point she made was the fact that not all her kids have iPhones.  Yes some kids do have very powerful mobile devices but not all do.  You could purchase an iPhone/iTouch for all your students to use for class, but you're still competing with their phones and the original disciplinary issues that prompted the discussion.  On the other hand, it's obviously not an option to leave out students who don't have the phones capable of keeping up with the classroom activities.  

And it's not just about how nice a phone you have.  An additional concern is having a sufficient data plan for the phones.  This is particularly challenging as a data plan is going to be a monthly expense.  I can imagine in the worst case scenario some student coming to class with a huge bill from data overages because they weren't thinking about their cell phone plan when they were working on their class project.  

So in many ways this limits your pedagogy to the lowest common denominator for your class.  This could be a problem if you're wanting to take advantage of complex webapps that some phones may not be able to handle, but any phone that can text can take advantage of Twitter.  Simply set up the student twitter accounts to accept tweets from the student's cell phone number and then you can project the twitter feed from the class on the wall like I discussed doing with DyKnow Vision and DyKnow's chat feature.

I think using texting as the lowest common denominator might be okay since the student who doesn't have the ability to text or surf the web is less likely to be using the phone in a disruptive manner (snake only holds my attention for so long).  So with those students you could provide them an access tool such as a computer or provided cell phone to take part in the classroom activity.  There are additional consequences to handing out cell phones as well (for instance who pays for the data plan) which is why I like that the iPod Touch will connect to your wireless... or the full-blown computer option.

The interesting consequence of all my thinking along this line is that it all points to a seemingly inevitable 1-1 cell phone program necessarily being introduced in the same ways that 1-1 laptop/tablet programs are being rolled out now.  All of this is for naught if classroom activities using the phones are not engaging enough to lure students from the dark side, but knowing that they can be I wonder if it would be a workable solution to the cell phone problem.  The big scary part of all this is that classroom management software like DyKnow Monitor won't be a part of this brave new world which can be very intimidating, so it's jumping into the deep end feet first.  No matter which way things go, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.
__________________________________________________
tweet this