Although my sister and I sometimes have completely different tastes and opinions (she attends UT Austin and uses Apple’s iPad while I attend A&M and use Window’s Surface tablet) we recently hit upon a topic that we both strongly agree on: allowing mobile phone use in the classroom.
We both received our educations in a school district that issued to the students multiple hardback textbooks every year. This was during the time when smartphones were barely being developed and the various social media sites were just starting to take off. Moving away from our small town home for college was a real eye-opening experience concerning how more enjoyable and efficient technology could make our learning experiences. Due to the extensive workload of our classes and how expensive textbooks can be these days we both decided to invest in a tablet to make life easier. This meant we would no longer have to carry around 30-50 lbs. of textbooks and still stay connected with our peers in way that allowed us to study smarter.
Unfortunately, we know well how unmanageable the cost of a tablet can be for many students. That is why we feel that educators and students need to take advantage of a readily available asset: their mobile phones. Today it is rare to find someone without a mobile phone. We already use them for almost every aspect of our lives, why not use them to make our educations easier and more engaging? With the growth of the phone app industry there are now apps available for almost anything. So many useful educational apps have been developed recently that we feel it is a waste to not use them. My sister recently discovered the joys of Duolingo, a free language learning app, and she swears by it as one of the best study and practice tools to maintain her Italian, German, and Spanish skills.
Looking at the plethora of educational apps and mobile devices available today, we both bemoan not having had the opportunity to use them in the classroom. It would have been great to use our phones to take quizzes, answer questions, and learn interactively. We believe using the phones in an iclicker like system would encourage students to answer and make it more efficient to grade and provide feedback. Reading from a dry textbook is no longer enough. Students needs to be engaged in order to learn better and by using the medium they know well, technology, it should be easier to make education more fun and productive.
Although there are many benefits of using mobile phones as learning tools in the classroom we acknowledge that they do present some problems that need to be dealt with. First, cost and access. While most children do own a mobile phone there are still many who do not have the resources to buy one for some reason or another. In order to mitigate the cost we feel that the schools can put a program in place to lower the cost of the mobile phone and plan (a partnership with the phone company perhaps) or they could devise a system to issue students a phone (like some schools issue ipads).
Furthermore, allowing any kind of technology always brings up the question of misuse. One main objection many educators have to allowing students to use their phones as learning tools in class is that they are afraid students will use them to play games and text with their friends instead of doing the school work. This is a valid concern, but we feel that there are ways to deal with it. We think that a clear set of rules should be outlined concerning the mobile phone use with reasonable punishments for when they are broken. We could even go one step further, and try to use an app to block game and social media site usage for the duration of the class, set at the beginning of each lecture.
There are so many ways technology could make teaching and learning more efficient and fun, but we understand that it is still a very controversial topic. Although we may believe that using mobile phones in the classroom would be a great help we understand that there are valid arguments for why it shouldn’t be allowed. Let us know what you think.
~Maria Lopez
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