A couple weeks ago (has it been that long? Boy time flies when you're getting no sleep and working all the time!) we had a great presentation by guest speaker Liz Kolb. Her enthusiasm is infectious and, despite the frustration I expressed in my previous post, I found myself able to start to think about ways technology can be useful in ANY classroom, even one faced with tough issues of access.
Cell phones - and, in particular, smart phones - are an incredible resource. Sometimes I just have to stop and boggle at the fact that I carry what is, effectively, a mini computer around with me in my pocket at all times. I can do almost anything on my phone that I can with a laptop, especially anything that involves communicating with the outside world. (And let's stop for a moment to appreciate the magic of laptops too. I'm old enough to remember when having a family desktop was a Big Deal. And I'm not very old.) Teenagers love their smartphones. They spend every possible second communicating - texting, snapchatting, instagramming, whatever kids are up to these days, it always revolves around sharing some piece of themselves with the world. As teachers, we need to be aware of this reality, and instead of fighting it, it seems like a pretty darn good idea to try to make it work in our favor.
Liz's talk helped me to see this idea as a genuine resource for the classroom with a lot of potential. She also struck a bit of a nerve with the whole "we can only imagine the classrooms we've been in" idea. I used a laptop a lot in high school (my school was a bit ahead of the curve and required all freshmen to bring a laptop) but it was pretty much only to take notes or write papers. The interactive piece wasn't really there yet. Unless you count emailing with the guy sitting right next to me during English class... but that brings me right back to my point. High schoolers ALWAYS want to be talking to each other. That's why one of the biggest challenges of classroom management is to get them to just stop talking for a while. But why is that the goal? Aren't their voices equally as valuable as the teacher's? If there's one thing that's really sunk in in my time in the MAC program, it's that people don't learn passively. It's the rare, dedicated bookworm that can learn well from lectures (*raises hand*). And because I do learn well in that style, it's required some stretching of my mental boundaries to fully realize that this is not at all the case for everyone, and that if I hope to be a truly successful teacher, I'm going to need to shift away from the mentality of "telling as teaching".
All of which is to say: Liz convinced me that cell phones can be a fantastic tool for making all student voices heard. One challenge I have encountered in my first stumbling forays into teaching is the difficulty of making on-the-fly assessments of the whole class. If I ask a question of the whole class and get a correct answer, well, I know that student understands, but chances are they are the same student who answers questions every day. This type of evaluation doesn't tell me the really valuable information: who DOESN'T get it.
Enter cell phones. I am envisioning a class in which we have some sort of collaboration tool set up and projected on the wall (Celly, Poll Everywhere, etc.) Students have their phones out, ready to answer any questions. At particular moments in the class, I solicit the whole class's ideas. Students use their phones to submit answers. If any student doesn't have a phone, or if the activity requires a smartphone, students can share in pairs and just pass off the phone for the other to submit their answer. The whole class's ideas come up on the screen - anonymously - and I can quickly get an idea of where the class is, and they in turn can see where their response stands in relation to their peers'. The conversation continues, enriched and shaped by both correct and incorrect answers, or just a variety of ideas, contributed by the students.
Liz helped me see that this model could really work. It's all about reaching students where they are. Students at my placement have their phones out all the time. They're not bad kids - they're just bored and itching for that sense of contact. If I could provide that contact to them in the form of a legitimate classroom activity, I think the buy in could be very high. Students would have greater ownership over the class conversation and even the quiet ones would have their ideas heard. Another benefit is that silence would no longer be a requirement - I could see all student answers even while there was a general level of chatter in the room (which is almost always in our class, I'm afraid).
The important thing is I can actually see this happening in a classroom now. There's a lot of details to think about, but I might even try to launch it as part of the "January restart". I am grateful to Liz to helping me to open my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. And when I teach, I'll be sure to always ask my kids: "What do you like to do?"
