There is a new country song by Brad Paisley and he sings about playing Pac Man at the arcade when he was younger, and now he plays it on his phone. He also talks about being on a video chat with someone from Japan. Both of these mobile technologies have changed the way we see the world… and how the world can see us. Technology has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our lives, including the classroom. Most of our discussion board posts related to the use of cell phones in the school. The majority of the teachers that posted stated quite emphatically that cell phones are a source of constant problems. I was enticed by the possible educational benefits of using cell phones in the schools. I watched a video from Teacher.tv that was “A look at the world of young people with mobile phones, and the impact on schools and education.” I was quickly aware that students depend on their cell phones and view them as a status symbol.
The area that was the most impactful to me was the number of students who admit to using their cell phones to cheat (35%). This number is certainly larger since the study only reported the students admitting to cheating. Another sad number was that 23% of students don’t believe that storing test information on your phone was considered cheating. Cheating is as old as the first test, but now cheating has gone high-tech. If you would like to read the entire report about cell phones, teens, and cheating, please click here to review the results from Common Sense Media.
There are some pilot programs that are using school-owned phones, often being funded from an outside source. Qualcomm funds a program called Project K-Nect to help at risk students with math. Jessica Bramble posted on the discussion board that it would be less expensive to have students use their cell phones instead of the school purchasing a responder system. This may be true, but we will always have the “have’s” and the “have not’s” and this would just drive the wedge in deeper. Unfortunately, I think the cons far outweigh the pros when deciding to use cell phones in the school. Calculators, not phones, should be used in the class during testing. I am definitely not against using new technologies in school, but I most assuredly am against cheating; and I think this is what happens much too often when cell phones are permitted/tolerating in the school.
Our discussions have taught me to think out of the box when it comes to using mobile technologies. My blog only focused on cell phones because I feel that the majority of our discussion posts tended to focus on them. I understand that mobile technologies is far more reaching than only cell phones. The only suggestion I have for our discussions would have been to focus on more than just cell phones. During our Instructional Strategies Matrix, we learned about countless hand-held devices that could certainly be considered mobile technology and would have been worthy of praise and discussion.
