Mobile Devices in the Classroom

Over the past 6 years that I have been teaching, I have seen the roles of mobile phones in the classroom change drastically. My first few years we had the policy “off and away until the end of the day.” That meant that students had to keep their mobile phones in their lockers throughout the school day. Then, things changed a few years ago when my school became a “bring your own technology” school. We had a traffic light system in place to indicate to students when it was appropriate to be on their phones and when it wasn’t.  Some teachers enforced the policy, some did not.  Over the past few years, mobile phone usage in the classroom has drastically increased, and unfortunately, often times students are not utilizing their devices for educational purposes, but instead for social media, and talking to friends.  This has led to many teachers banning the use of phones in the classroom.  But what does the research say--how do students feel about having phones in the classroom? What are ways that we can utilize phones for educational purposes? 

A recent article (Jan 2018) from Education and Information Technologies focused on mobile phones in the infrastructure for learning in Swedish Secondary Schools. The interesting part of this article is that it’s from the perspective of the students.  While “the use of the mobile phone enhanced the students’ own mobility, flexibility, and individuality,” students reported both advantages and disadvantages.  Some students stated that they used their phones just to check the time, while others used it for more advanced purposes.  Some also admitted to using phones for leisure and gaming purposes.  More concerning goes back to the idea of mobile phone dependency. “This addiction like condition following in the deprivation of the mobile phone can be understood as a breakdown in the infrastructure that they depend on. That breakdown makes the students aware of the devices’ significance for their social life and ultimately for their well-being.” (Samaha and Hawi 2016) What does this mean? With the presence in classrooms we need to learn to integrate rather than prohibit technology (Berry and Westfall 2015).  These digital natives that we are teaching grew up surrounded by Smartphones, thus the Smartphone has become integrated in their lifestyle.  We have to find ways to utilize these phones for educational purposes.

With the average age of receiving a mobile phone at 9.5, and students aged 12-17 spending 3.4 hours daily on their phones, it would be nice to find some way to make phones an asset in the classroom rather than a distractor.  My school had a good plan with the traffic light system, the big issue is that we need consistency across the school.  We need to be sure that students are well educated with the system, and parents, too.  Often times at parent conferences I find parents shocked to know that students are allowed to use their devices in the classroom.  With more education to parents and having parents on board, perhaps we could curb the issue of students misusing the technology in the classroom.  Another issue is students find ways around the security measures put in place to utilize their social media sites.  As of 2000, all public schools had internet access, and there were AUPs and some security firewalls in place.  As of recently, schools have been trying out NetSpark.  “NetSpark provides several services – supervision of graphics, filtering – avoiding exposure to undesirable content without blocking the entire internet page, filtering content in real time – supervision and filtering of the page during use.”  (International Journal of Higher Education 12/17)  That could be something good to consider for our children’s safety but to ensure they are still able to take advantage of most of the content on the site. 

Regardless of your take on mobile devices in the classroom, one thing for certain, mobile devices are embedded in every aspect of our students’ lives.  If we can find a way to ensure the devices are not distractors, and we educate students and parents on ways to utilize devices for educational benefit, mobile devices really could be a huge asset to educators.