This has been a interesting week on the Instructional Technology front, before class on friday Teri and I had a work shop in Atlantic City with Beverly Plein from the NJ DOE. Things started a little slow, she kicked things of with this
video called
I need my teachers to learn . It is a bit cheesy but the point is important; we should not, and can not hold back our students because we are unwilling to adapt!
The workshop ended up being very informative, the first half was all about the Social Studies CCCS's which are online and very interactive. With just a few clicks you can get specific lesson and unit ideas as well as student activities, a HUGE upgrade from the 2006 CCCS's that I have printed out on my desk. For the last 1 1/2 hours we talked about technology integration and Beverly gave us plenty of 2.0 tools and ideas to "update" our teaching. The thing that stuck with me the most though was her insistence that we need to allow cell phones into the classrooms as instructional tools.
I have not been able to stop thinking about cell phones, between our A.C. workshop and research that I am doing for Thursday's project I am consumed by it. I polled my students and learned that about 60% have internet access! Thats right... 60% of students have computers in their pockets which they are not allowed to use. Why Not? My sister (a fellow educator) was down this weekend and we had some heated discussion on the topic (yes I am a loser debating cell phones in the classroom on a Saturday night)
Argument 1- They will cheat
- I argued that we need to look at cellphones as a tool, like a notebook or textbook, just like when you give a test/quiz and the textbooks go away so will the cellphones. They will not be allowed to have them out while testing and they will understand this. Also there will be no talking on the phones, we can put in place a "fingers only" rule.
Argument 2- They will text each other
- THEY ALREADY DO!!! I can only speak for myself but dealing with cellphones is the #1 classroom management problem. If I wrote students up every time I caught them texting the AP's would hate me, as teachers we deal with it by repeatedly telling them to put it away with the occasional write up. When phones can be out in the open I truly feel that there will be no increase in texting, the 80% of "good" kids who pay attention in class will still be paying attention. And the hopefully the others can multi task.
Argument 3- What will phones add?
- The educational cell phone movement is growing and new apps/websites are popping up daily to help teacher and schools who wish to embrace the reality of the future. During thursday nights presentation I will be discussing a list of practical classroom uses with examples like; blogging, polls, note taking, research etc.
There were plenty of other discussions however this post is already ridiculously too long (if anyone is still reading) My final point is this... Do you honestly think that ten, even five years from now cell phones will still be banned from school? No, by that time they will all have internet access, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, etc. all in the palm of their hands.
So why don't we adapt and turn our public enemy #1 into a very powerful educational tool.
