Hello there my Friends & fellow Educators,
A kind teacher who joined us last week at Prince Sultan University ask me a question this morning:
"How can I solve some educational problems with technology?"
Dynamite question!!!
One of the issues that is common today is with the technology actually already being in the classroom & teachers not having any control over it or how it's being used.
That is, mobile phones. Students have them & are using them in class. Even when they are banned by very well-meaning administrations or teachers, they still end up in class. When confronted with this, I personally saw the mobile phone as a competitor for my students' attention. I was extremely frustrated, as I am sure you are.
So, I faced two choices:
- I could continue to compete with whomever (or, indeed, whatever!) is on the other end of the mobile phone & more attractive than my lesson & curriculum.
Or . . .
- I could embrace that mobile phone as some kind of mediator of the ideas & knowledge - the lessons & curriculum - I wanted to get into the students' minds.
I needed to get myself & lessons on the the right side of that interface that was glued to my students' faces.
Let me suggest some very beginning steps that helped me come to a more favorable relationship with the mobile in the classroom (whether we like it there or not). As a communicative function & a sort of bonding exercise, I Bluetooth pair with each of the students in my class. I do this in class as an exercise to show them that I am able to use technology & am not opposed to it being used in the classroom. I do this at the beginning of the semester & it allows me an additional step to aid in memorizing student names & getting to know about them. The step-by-step process of Bluetooth pairing is displayed visually in my presentation Tablet Technology for Teachers. It is the very first planet on the of the solar system Prezi diagram.
Another thing I have found useful for building rapport & getting their mobiles/tablets on our side is setting up a WhatsApp group. Initially, I had established these WhatsApp groups as a simple form of bonding & social networking. Again, I wanted the students to know that I could use the technology & that it was useful in an educational environment - for posting assignments or sharing links to online research/media, for example.
However, one hot Thursday afternoon I was having the worst of times attracting my students' attention. Just formulating my philosophy on Digitally Interfacing Classrooms, I thought to myself, "I bet if I send them a question through the WhatsApp group, I'm more likely to get a personal & individual response from each student." So, I sent a question regarding the lesson at hand & asked them to "thumb" me a response in grammatically & syntactically correct English before they could be released for the coming break. As, the activity was in a digitally public forum (they could all see each others' WhatsApp messages in our "ENG101 - English Only" group), peer-to-peer criticism (constructive in the teasing way young men have with each others' errors) produced some excellent responses & helped me draw their attentions away from their Instagram or other chatting apps.
I know these may be seen as experimental & possibly dangerous.
Well, maybe that's where we are right now.
Short of taking their phones away & provoking the "engage me or enrage me" response that Marc Prensky observes in Teaching Digital Natives, I am not going to win an outright battle with an iPhone 6 or Xperia Z3. I'm just not that stimulating or attractive. And if I won that battle by force & discipline, I'd be losing the students anyway - as they rebelliously fold their arms & glare menacingly at me from under their eyebrows. That can be very intimidating, as I teach full-grown young men at an industrial vocational institution.
I believe, my dear friends, that the idea is to approach the technology as a potential friend, not an enemy. That's all. How can we make the existing & resident technology our friend & helper?
I hope some of this helps & I will continue to answer as many questions as I have stories for.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to communicate my ideas & please send back other questions, answers or comments you have as well.
Thank you so much!
Ryan
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