IN ECUADOR
It is quite a controversial issue – mobiles and smartphones in the
classroom… and my amazement when I learnt that a lot of teachers actually
forbid the students to use them. Even I was one of them…Mobile learning is seen by many as a disruptive technology. This is
because it has been identified as a technology which holds great potential to
transform the learning and teaching within a classroom.Now, I’m a teacher who does that only during
the tests and I rather encourage my students to use their phones in the
classroom on a regular basis. And teach them how to use their phones to help
them learn.
You see, the generation of 14-16 year old
people is called digital natives, as opposed to us, digital immigrants, people
who lived without the Internet. They are claimed to feel as comfortable in the
virtual world as in the real one – but I find it quite hard to agree. I think
being born in a particular environment makes you a native – but doesn’t
necessarily make you feel comfortable about it..
It’s the same with a smartphone/mobile
phone/anything with Internet access and the classroom. They’ve had those
devices ever since they remember but it doesn’t mean they know how to use them
efficiently. I believe we – the teachers – shouldn’t forbid but we should teach
them how to use their devices in a classroom and in a learning process. Let me
present a couple of ideasfocused on using mobiles/smartphones in the classroom:
Ø Dictionaries
- The easiest thing is – they have access to
their own dictionaries. That’s pretty good, especially that more and more
children have problems with traditional dictionaries due to their lack of
knowledge of the alphabet (it’s not funny, it’s the ugly truth).
Ø Google – a
very useful tool
Ø Camera- Making and recording roleplays, creating commercials and weather
forecasts, etc. and any interview is better when recorded!
Ø Music - Sometimes a nice award for
a good student is to let him play a song he loves most so that we can all
listen to it (and then say what the song is about). Sometimes it’s just a nice
idea for a break – to listen to a song
Ø Film presentations - The role
of films – and youtube in general – may be a blessing in a classroom without an
interactive whiteboard/ projector. It’s quite easy to tell the students to
watch a short film focusing on a lesson’s topic
Ø Pictures - we can
use pictures students take in a classroom, especially in the exam-preparation
courses, where the students will have to describe a picture on their oral part.
A nice idea is also to take a picture of an everyday object but in such a weird
way the rest of the class would have to guess what object it is.
