Co-Opting Mobile Devices for the Classroom
Encouraging and Empowering Students To Take Learning Into Their Own Hands
Three years ago, Tennessee’s Greeneville High School instituted a policy that shocked its peers. Many were downright incredulous. Some were even scornful. The school began allowing—even encouraging—their students to use their mobile devices in class.
With unauthorized mobile device usage capable of subverting individual student attention, disrupting entire classrooms and generally sidelining the important educational work at hand, at least according to popular instructional dogma, what compelled them to institute such an apparently foolhardy plan?
Appropriation of a powerful and pervasive tool, not marginalization
Says district Virtual Learning Coordinator and foreign-language teacher Jason Horne, “If you polled most high school teachers across the country what the top three problems in class are today, most would say mobile phones. And yet we simply don’t have that problem at all. Instead of marginalizing their use, we’ve appropriated them as a learning tool.”
Horne continues: “iPhones and Droids are essentially tiny laptops. And kids—and adults, too—use these devices all day, every day. It’s become so pervasive, seamless and thoughtless that it’s not even noticeable. It’s just part of what we do and who we are. So why make something so fundamental and helpful taboo?”
Creative, fun and engaging applications—let Greeneville count the ways
Here are just a few of the ways that Greeneville High School’s teachers are incorporating these ubiquitous, hand-held computers into the learning process in creative and successful ways:
Video of the “Textas Shootout” learning game.
Click here for an explanation of the rules of the game, as well as some sample questions!
A NECC of an idea
It all started when Principal Linda Stroud attended a session at The International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio in 2008. As Stroud listened to topic expert Liz Kolb and two
In In 2009, a Greeneville High School (TN) sophomore pinpoints an address in France with the help of her cell phone and Google Earth. She and the rest of teacher Jason Horne’s French I class were learning about the cost of living in France. Photos by Staci Parvin.
other educators from the United Kingdom present on the value of mobile devices as learning tools, she “had that proverbial aha moment,” says Stroud. “It changed my whole paradigm.” Returning from NECC, Stroud embarked upon some research that only fortified her newfound position on mobile devices in the classroom.
“Cell phones are powerful technological tools,” explains Stroud. “With most cell phones that our students bring with them to school everyday, they can make calls, text, e-mail, connect to the Internet, take pictures and even make videos. What’s more, it costs the school nothing. The students and parents are providing this technology to us for free!”
Laying the groundwork
But before opening up the floodgates to rampant cell phone use, Principal Stroud wanted everyone to be clear on the rules. In her memo, she explained Greeneville High School’s new cell phone policy:
Any student who is observed texting, making calls, taking pictures
or video or using a cell phone for any purpose without teacher permission
and direction between the hours of 7:40 and 2:40 will have the cell
phone taken by the teacher and turned into the main office.
The cell phone will be kept by the administration for 7 days, or the
student may pay a $20 cash fine at the end of the day for the return
of their phone.
I also strongly encourage all teachers to make it part of your classroom
culture (and our school culture) to require students to lay their cell
phones on their desks at the beginning of each class, whether you will
be using their cell phones during instruction, or not.
This will take away their ability to text in their hoodie pockets!
The rules and consequences are strategic. If she kept the phone for more than a week, which is agony for the average teenager, the students would be too tempted to get a new phone. As for the fine, students might pony up $20 once, maybe twice, but after that the cost would become much too steep for most students to afford. Stroud calculated perfectly. Each year, the number of incidents and fines has decreased dramatically.
Says Horne: “Once upon a time in Greeneville, mobile phones were a major discipline problem. Today, it’s not even on our radar.”
Enthusiastic edtech expansion
Stroud is proud of her school’s track record when it comes to technological adoption. The high school building is 100-percent wireless, every teacher has had a Gateway laptop for three years already and a large percentage of them are proficient, active purveyors of technology-enabled education in their classroom. One such teacher is Horne, a self-described techie that’s been playing with computers since he got his first one at six years old. He was one of the first and most successful incorporators of technology into his classrooms, which led to his acceptance of the virtual learning coordinator position two years ago.
While in his recent role, Horne has watched edtech adoption expand in his district. Lots of students take online courses for summer school credit. Greeneville participates in a 1st Congressional District consortium with other area high schools, sending and receiving distance learning courses over video-teleconferencing technology. In just two examples, Greeneville pipes out Mandarin Chinese to one school and pipes in German from another. “It’s a huge help for smaller schools to get classes they can’t offer and a huge help to bigger schools with numbers.” He’s also been busy presenting at conferences and other districts outside the state on Greeneville’s mobile device policy and how classrooms are using them, all while piloting a mobile-device program at two other high schools with a fellow doctoral student at Eastern Tennessee State University.
“Empowering students to find answers”
However, after the summer, he’s returning to the classroom. “I’m passionate about teaching and bringing technologies such as this into teaching. I’ve seen the transformation from battling with cell phones to using them. The more kids can learn about proper etiquette and use of technological tools, the better. We should empower our students to find answers on their own, not discourage it. If my students are in France, chances are they’re not going to have a dictionary but they will have a mobile device. I want to teach them to use technology in a productive way.”
Text searching was, and will once again become, a seamless part of his classes. “Oftentimes when students have a question, I’ll direct them to text search so that I can continue lecturing uninterrupted,” says Horne. “Other times students take the initiative. When they’ve found something they’d like to share, they simply raise their hands and share with the class. It makes learning more interactive and it builds a good habit: kids are proactively getting information and satisfying their own curiosity rather than relying on the teacher. Moreover, it’s amazing how fast answers come back. It’s totally replaced dictionaries in my classes.” The school has chosen not to buy new foreign language dictionaries or even student planners next year, saving the district $10 a student.
There’s a caveat, as there always is when researching with the aid of the Internet. “You have to be careful with information you get online,” admonishes Horne. “You need to understand your source and you don’t need to take that information at face value. But that’s a learning opportunity too. It teaches students to discern what’s good information and what’s not reliable.”
An alternative to “clickers”
Another favorite cell phone application of Horne’s and his colleagues’ is Polleverywhere.com, a service that allows groups of individuals to vote within user-generated polls using a mobile phone’s text messaging capability or a simple web form. It’s a powerful classroom tool because of its ability to capture an audience’s thoughts and understandings at a given moment in time, and is an especially phenomenal resource for classrooms not equipped with audience response systems (ARS) or “clickers.”
“We used Poll Everywhere to stage our own mock presidential election on Election Day this past year,” explains Horne. “The entire school voted and we could watch our election results update in real time on the website.”
The service is very versatile, allows multiple choice or write-in responses, and is free of charge to classes of up to 30 students. Each poll can only have 30 responses, but the results can be emptied and the poll reused. For larger groups, there are fees involved. Says Horne, “At the end of a class, I might ask students via Poll Everywhere, ‘Tell me one thing you’ve learned about verbs today.’ Our English teachers use it all the time for reinforcing vocabulary. For instance, they’ll tell the class ‘Write a sentence with the word perspicacious.’ They’ll all text, view the answers on the board and discuss them.”
Horne encourages teachers to use the service, as it can:
A student in Jason Horne’s 2009 sophomore French I looks up the current financial exchange rate to better understand the difference in housing costs between France and the US. Photos by Staci Parvin.
From Trapper Keepers to mobile devices
Many educators dream of 1:1 laptop computing for their students. Horne and his colleagues certainly have harbored that dream for some time. But for now, that dream continues to be too cost-prohibitive, but he feels like cell phones aren’t a bad consolation dream come true. “They’re little computers,” he explains. “They can surf the Internet, word process, take pictures and 98 percent of our students have them, despite the fact that 40 percent of them are on free and reduced lunch. When I was a kid, every kid had a Trapper Keeper. Today, every kid has a mobile device of some kind.”
“Instructionally, they’ve become a very valuable part of my classes,” says Horne. “From a classroom management perspective, it’s made my life wonderful now that the phones are out on the desks.”
“And we’re just somewhere between the crawling and walking stage with this,” Horne continues. “The future is wide open. Personal handheld devices is the where everything is going. The goal is to incorporate these and other technologies until they’re as second nature as pencils and paper. We’ve made a good start.”
