The touch-screen classroom by Kate Lunau

How technology can reinvent how and where children learn.

Kate Lunau writes, "At Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ont., students are banned from using their cellphones in the hallways. In Eric Moccio’s classroom, it’s a different story. Moccio, who teaches music and media arts, employs his students’ phones as a teaching tool: he recently had them vote via text message on the topic of an upcoming video project."

Photo: Macleans.ca

Moccio projected a live chart to the front of the class, which “readjusted to show numbers as votes came in, American Idol-style,” he says. Another time, he ran a scavenger hunt, texting clues to students as they searched through the school. (That day, he got special permission from administration, and each student carried a signed note of permission to use their phone.) Today’s smartphones can do much more than just make calls; “they’re computers,” Moccio says, and with so many students carrying powerful devices in their pockets these days, “we’d be fools not to use them.”

Despite the technology-rich environment that surrounds kids outside school walls, most classrooms are lagging. Administrators worry that the use of phones, iPods and tablets could cause distractions, promote the rise of cyberbullying and other bad behaviour, and maybe erode literacy skills, fretting that students might start including textisms like “CUL8R” in their essays. While some school boards have resorted to bans on some technologies, not all educators agree that’s a good idea. In September, the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, reversed a rule that personal devices should be turned off and out of sight within its schools, after trustees recognized that smartphones and other devices might actually enhance student learning. Now, teachers like Moccio are experimenting with new ways to use not only smartphones but tablet computers and interactive whiteboards. Indeed, proponents say that, at its best, technology can change virtually any place into a classroom—or transform a classroom into somewhere as remote and different as a Borneo rainforest.

Phones make ideal teaching tools because, unlike laptops or spiral notebooks, students are unlikely to forget them at home. “They have quite a strong emotional attachment to these devices,” says Patricia Wallace, author of The Psychology of the Internet and senior director of information technology at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. Mobile phones are portable, especially for elementary school kids, who can’t lug a heavy computer in their backpack. And because they’re easy to carry everywhere, they can be used to take advantage of what she calls “micro time slots,” those spare moments waiting for the bus or a friend, when a teen could complete a quick lesson instead of a game of Angry Birds.
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Source: Macleans.ca