Mobile phones in classrooms

Just picking up on a comment of Derek’s

Just over one in five (20.2%) said they left the phone on in lessons – which is usually forbidden by schools. Should this statistic be a surprise – and what of the ‘forbidden by schools’? Does this represent a bias in the way mobile phones are regarded in a school setting? What’s wrong with having a mobile left on in class – provided the appropriate courtesies are observed about sound off and avoiding distracting behaviour etc.?

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing an innovative english teacher in a secondary school who was integrating the students’ mobiles into her lessons in several ways:

• She was getting them to use predictive txt to teach spelling.
• Those that had internet access on their phones she appointed as researchers to look up quick facts for the rest of the group, eg. when students came back from break saying they had heard that Michael Jackson had died she got somebody to find out as much as they could from their phone and report back to the class.
• She put a mobile number up on the board and said it was a mobile phone dictionary and if you txt a word to it the definition will be returned. The number was actually her phone, and when students sent a word to it she would secretly return the definition.

The mobiles that students have in their pockets are being increasingly powerful devices – why not try and make maximum use of them.