Using Cellphones in Class for Education
Apr 9th, 2008 by Scott Walker
The following post may be a little too cutting edge for some, and still old news for others, but it at the very least shows a potential resource that could be tapped to reduce the strain on low budget schools needing more computers with internet connection. Rules and guidelines will still need to be hashed out, and key figures will need to be made believers, but the possibility is out there. With that said… here is the post.
I had an interesting experience this week that challenged a lot of what I write about. The students were working on research for a project I have them working on. With only two extra computers in the classroom, there was a line of students waiting to access online sources. While the students were working I had a student pose a question. He had a phone with internet capabilities, and was wondering whether he could use it to study. I almost immediately said no, but I thought about it instead. Considering that our school’s policy states that use of personal electronic devices is at the teacher’s digression, I said yes… but that the student had to keep it where I could see it at all times and told him that all rules regarding internet access at the school would apply. He agreed.
He immediately hopped on to Wikipedia. This was his first problem. Not because it has often unreliable sources.(He was researching Metal music, something that is probably better suited for wikipedia than most) The problem was the speed with which the pages were rendering. So I pointed him to wapedia.mobi which is a version of wikipedia for handheld devices. From that point he was locked in and ready to go. Considering the student, he undoubtedly did a whole lot more reasearch from his phone than he would have done on any full size computer simply due to the fact that he was doing something that no one else was doing. Would this feeling wear off? Probably, but not that day.
There could have obviously been some serious problems with this scenerio. He could have started texting his friends or visiting uneducational sites. This of course is why I had him by the other computers, keeping it where I could see it. Considering that rules haven’t been hashed out for this type of use, a number of things could go wrong. The point here is that as technology gets better, the more we can stop taking away the tools that students use on a daily basis and start finding ways to harnass it, we could find ourselves easing the strains on our technology starved schools.
How do you feel about this? Problems, ideas? Leave them in the comments.