Three years ago, I predicted that the iPhone, and phones like it, would soon become everyday educational tools. Where are we up to with that? Having spotted this on the Orange website, I’d say we are now only a year away.
If Justin Bieber is endorsing a phone, then it must be cheap enough to appeal to the teenage demographic. Where this gets interesting is that this phone has a nice big touch screen and runs the iPhone’s open-source cousin, Android.
From September, then, you can expect an increasing proportion of your students to be carrying these powerful, permanently-connected computers in their pockets.
How will you respond?
- Will you feel threatened and try to suppress their use?
- Or will you see a great way to get around the resource limitation of not enough computers in the school, and embrace the possibilities?
Yacapaca 
2 responses to “Justin Bieber brings elearing into your classroom, even if you don’t have computers”
I have spent the last two weeks teaching the children to script, record and edit audio using Audacity to produce a short advert (more of a fun end of term exercise than a teaching module).
Since a classroom with 20 children in it is a noisy environment, I set them out of the class to record their speech on their mobile phones and then send me the file via Bluetooth, whoch was then converted using Format Factory into an MP3.
The kids loved beiing able to use their own phones for this and use the Bluetooth feature for something useful. Our department is not afraid to let the students use their phones for this and other projects (though we are careful to ensure they are not recording images or video of staff or other children without consent).
In my opinion, the barrier to using mobile phones in the classroom will not be the technology itself nor staff training in the technology, but the danger of students abusing this and posting material on social networking sites.
Sounds like a great project, and it’s also a super example of where a phone is actually a better computer than a laptop would be.
But how can you justify the claim that having students engage in literacy activities they find highly meaningful is a ‘danger’? Isn’t it your job as a teacher to promote the use of social networks?