Walking the Technology Walk

       Our school district talks a lot about technology—but with three 15-year-old computers in most of our classrooms, there’s not much walk with that talk.  So why would any teacher be reluctant to put to use Internet-accessible computers that students bring into our classrooms with them?  More than half of my seniors walk into my classroom with such computers—only they call them cell phones!

       Our students are symbiotically enmeshed with these technological devices, and in ways that grievously irritate most teachers.   You see, we aren’t here because we need a job.  We’re here because we truly and deeply believe that what we have to impart to our tender young charges is crucially significant to their lives and intellectual wellbeing—far more significant than their plans for nutrition break as negotiated through text messages!  So when they make those plans their priority, instead of what we think should be their priority… well, let’s just say that for me, that is a significant threat to my psychological comfort zone.  So, between my control issues—I mean, my comfort zone, and the fact that I do not, in fact, really understand the astronomical potentialities of those tiny devices, and therefore am rather threatened by them, it seems the easiest policy to follow is “Off with their heads!”  

       Is Mr. Carroll’s Queen of Hearts someone I want to take for my pedagogical model?

       While I wouldn’t mind my classroom being seen as moderately analogous to what was down the rabbit hole, I’d like my students to be able to accomplish something Alice never did:  making sense of what’s going on down there.  My students grew up with entirely different information processing strategies than those I and most of my colleagues experienced.  But as a general rule, our strategies are what’s in place in our classrooms.  And unfortunately, our students make about as much sense of those strategies as Alice made of mushrooms.

       There are many ways to access our students’ information processing systems, but, much to our dismay, most of them involve screens.  This becomes problematic when there are only three screens in the classroom.  So forcing the twenty-plus kids who enter the room with fully functional, Internet-accessing screens to keep them in their pockets—or, rather, under their desks!—seems utterly profligate.  

       Results of my research were overwhelming:  cell phones helped students.  From organizational tasks like recording assignments or filing information to higher level cognitive skills like taking literature notes or creating symbolic visuals, cell phones enabled students to process information more effectively and professionally.  And we really didn’t even officially “use” either the Internet or word processing capabilities of the steadily increasing (from over 50% to begin with) number of “smart phones.”

 

       For most of the world, cell phones are the majority of the population’s personal computers.  If cell phones give our students access to more effective (for them) information processing strategies, aren’t we being negligent if we refuse to allow them in our classrooms?