Media and Education: Part II

As an Honors Student, every year I am, along with the rest of my Honors' colleagues, required to attend a day of conferences on a variety of perspectives about a given topic as a component of the Honors Fellowship grant that we receive . This year the topic was Environment. As I sat in each of the five conferences that I attended to day, I recognized the presence of technology and the Media in just about all of them; some overtly, some subtly. The first conference I attended, entitled The Outdoor Classroom: A Cure for the "Nature Deficit Disorder", was presented by Dr. Karen Megay-Nespoli, Professor of Education, St. Joseph's College. Her presentation was dynamic, to say the least, and successfully modeled how to engage students in the classroom with technology. She had polls within her powerpoint slides that were interactive and allowed for us to text our answers to poll questions via a site named polleverywhere.com. It was so exciting to text my answer to the question, "What was your favorite childhood game to play outside?", and see it almost instantly pop up on the screen! Not only was my answer represented but it was cool to see the responses of my peers flash on the screen, as well. What was even more profound was the fact that we were allowed to use our cells phones openly in class! The professor okay'd it! She was using her's, too! She must have read the expression of utter surprise on my face because she said the cell phones are "The Device" According to Megay-Nespoli, in Korea, China, and all over Europe, cellular ohione use in the classroom is common place. They are used for everything from note-taking to presentations to video-conferencing inter-classrooms and every in-between.

As a burgeoning educator, I would incorporate the use of cell phones as a learning tool in my classroom. With development and adherence to specific rules, students could feasibly use cell phones to create short movies, set homework reminders, record their teachers' readings of poems, time experiments via phone stopwatches, access relevant Web sites, and transfer electronic files between school and home. For a school with a limited number of digital cameras and limited Internet access in classrooms, cell phones can help fill in the gaps, serving almost as mobile computers. In this way, cell phones behave as Meyrowitz says it does: It changes the way we behave in a certain social setting. In this case, the social setting being altered in the classroom. The cell phone affords students the opportunity to transcend the confines of the classroom and explore alternative ways of evidencing their learning that more effectively represents their personal and collective fields of intelligences. Access to information and ideas is brought to another, and in my observation, more elevated level.

With a cell phone in the classroom, a teacher might be able to simulate or supervise a student's phone interview for a possible internship or apprenticeship. For a student interested in information technology or telecommunications, a cell phone can certainly be a learning tool. Maybe I'm being too naive or unrealistically positive about the integration of cell phones into the classroom but, one thing seems clear: cell phones are not going away anytime soon, and when they do, it will be because they have been replaced by some new technology with its own benefits and drawbacks. Why not find a way to turn them into a teachable moment instead of a teaching distraction!