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In a classroom with sixty future teachers I tried an experiment. “Everybody have their mobile phones?” I asked. They looked surprised. “OK,” I told these Michigan State University students, “you have fifteen minutes to receive a text message. The message must say (1) where the person is, (2) what they ate for lunch today, and (c) what decade were they born in.” Then I offered extra credit if the text response came from outside the US, and more extra-credit if it was both from outside the country and in a language other than English. Instantly the room was filled fingers flying across tiny keypads, and within fifteen minutes we had far more responses than students. “What could we do with this information?” I asked. “Could we graph it? Map it? Analyze it for information on diet? Work on translating the French, German, Spanish, and Urdu messages we received?”

This wasn’t an original idea of mine. A friend had emailed me an online video on best practices in education and I had grabbed this assignment from that. But it was a powerful lesson. Just the week before another instructor in education at MSU had been quoted in a New York Times article complaining about cell phones in the classroom and I had forcefully argued that this was the wrong tack to take. Mobile phones are potentially the most powerful communication and information device ever created, I had suggested, and they are already everywhere. How blind, I asked, must we as educators be if we cannot use such a remarkable tool? If we cannot teach with such a remarkable tool? If we cannot help students see how this tool will impact their lives in amazing ways as they go forward? So I went into the class wanting to show future teachers one more way to embrace the technology of the 21^st Century rather than fearing it.

My ideas about mobile phones in education are not original either. Around the world educators are utilizing this technology. Phones deliver content via text, they allow intra-classroom communication (students using Bluetooth to text answers to their teachers), they provide sophisticated handheld calculators, they take photos which document experiments, they act as digital voice recorders, they play podcasts of pre-recorded lessons, they support second language acquisition, they support and encourage writing, and where the phones connect to the internet, they give students handheld access to the world’s greatest library. Researchers and teachers in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Israel, Portugal, Germany, Spain, Singapore, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Korea, New Zealand, Kenya and dozens of other nations are developing and supporting “mobile learning” initiatives. In the United Kingdom the government just supported the publication of a remarkable book (available as a pdf download) from the Institute of Education at the University of London, Mobile Learning – towards a research agenda, which looks at the many cognitive interactive effects of this new educational context. TeachersTV in the UK – an online training tool, produced a half-hour video this fall on the power of mobile phones in the classroom.

Having excited my class with the phone lesson, and having met with them again to investigate all the ways that new technologies and electronic devices can support diverse learners – including the students they will mostly work with, those with learning, attention, and behavioral “disabilities,” I came home on Tuesday night, watched House, and then the local news. And on the local news I heard a top story about East Grand Rapids Schools blocking cell phone use and prohibiting iPod use. The story went on to say how this new policy was similar to those in Holland and other West Michigan cities, but less restrictive than the Grand Rapids Public Schools which, if the story was correct, prohibited all student electronic devices. Why? I asked myself, why, in a state so desperate to prepare our children for a new global economy, would we be so reluctant to actually begin to do that?

Educational researcher Alan November called American schools, “reality free zones” in the June 2007 issue of Technology and Learning magazine. “If we could get past our fear of the unknown and embrace the very tools we are blocking (which are also essential tools for the global economy),” he said, “then we could build much more motivating and rigorous learning environments. We also have an opportunity to teach the ethics and the social responsibility that accompany the use of such powerful tools.” He went on to discuss how today’s students have “information and communication containers” different than those of past generations – mobile phones, iPods, blogs, computers, instant messaging, video games. These technologies are certainly different than the 16^th through 19^th Century technologies comfortable for those who run the schools in West Michigan (pens, paper, printed books, notebooks, chalkboards), but they are no less valid, just as those old technologies are no less fraught with potential problems.

“Yes,” I have told teachers, phones in school can cause problems. Then I hold up my right hand, still scarred from where a friend stabbed me with a pencil in fifth grade. “The school, for some reason,” I say, “did not choose to ban pencils because of my injury.” I could point out that the school did not ban pencils (or paper either) when students were caught using them to write notes to friends, or to cheat, or to graffiti the boys’ room walls. Instead, the schools kept those technologies in place in the classroom, and taught both with them and the appropriate use of them.

For today’s students, who will graduate into a world dominated by digital technology and instant communication, the mobile phone (along with November’s other “containers”) will be at least as essential as all the technologies those who make school policy learned “back then” – pens and pencils, books and paper, card catalogs and library organization, typewriters and the old-style telephone. Right now students who are not experienced with their iPods will be at a disadvantage at many of our best universities (Duke and Stanford for example) and will likely be behind in language classes everywhere. Students who cannot search information quickly and effectively online will be unable to do college-level research or function at all in graduate school, or – and this is increasingly true throughout the economy – hold most jobs. Students who cannot communicate well with their employers by email and text-message will be in trouble in many ways. Yet with all that, our K-12 schools resist, using technology in the most limited ways – restricting the function to that of antique forms – the computer becomes little more than a typewriter or – with PowerPoint – a filmstrip projector.

The lesson I gave my students in instant text-message research is just one of many I try to provide. I encourage laptops in the classroom, and ask students to look things up for me, to check on the things I or other students say, and to communicate the results quickly to their classmates via email. I ask them to keep their mobile phones on their desks – that way – if they’ve forgotten to silence them and they do ring, we are all not listening while everyone searches their backpacks. I talk about the etiquette of taking important calls. I strongly encourage email conversation and debate. I expect use of Google, Google Scholar, Wiktionary, Wikipedia and talk about the best ways to use those essential tools. In the classrooms so equipped I use the Interactive White Boards (“SmartBoards”) not with PowerPoint but with on-line resources. I want these future teachers to know that they cannot fear these technologies in their classrooms, because their students must learn to use them.

New technologies scare and confuse people raised in the past. They scare and confuse schools. I recently found a series of articles from an 1842 educational journal explaining to teachers how to use the newest technology – the chalkboard – and reassuring them that “this new system” would not “replace books.” 2,500 years ago Plato feared literacy would destroy students' memorization skills and the quality of spoken language. So the fears we see around computers and mobile phones are simply part of a long pattern. But we cannot afford to simply train our students to be “just like us.” We must help them to navigate the world that is their future, and we cannot do that if we keep the technologies which will define that future out of our schools.

http://www.grandrapidsfumc.org/videos/20071209.htm

not You-Tube - you must click on the image or the link
and the church's site will load and the video will play
or download and play in your own player

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coirnéal

from the back corner of the room
you can watch the rain fall

From the back corner of the room you can watch the rain fall. This makes it better. Of course the school was old and the lights didn’t quite brighten each corner the way newer lights might have. And if the wind was blowing out of the north then it whistled as it slipped between the aging wooden window frames. And the dim and the sound cut the connections to the lesson the other lads were following or were not following. It always amazes me that teachers give up, but they do, and their vision shrinks to the things they either want to see or have to see. And if you can stay out of either of those categories – if you sit in the back, in the corner, by the window, and you don’t say anything, and you don’t challenge anything, and don’t respond every time Johnny or Eamon throws something at you, you vanish in ways you hoped but weren’t sure you could. And the rain comes down, and splashes against the glass, and you watch it drift from the heavens to the ground. Safe despite the place which surrounds you.
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copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - photograph - another of the series which includes the cover of The Drool Room - is by Owen Higgins
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teagasc

On

“Every one of these boys is ADHD,” the first year teacher says, “They must have dumped them all on me.” “Maybe,” I offer. She has filled this classroom with all the touches. Every wall blares words and pictures and inspirational posters. Four computers each show different – and constantly moving – screen savers. A huge television hangs near the side of the chalkboard, rotating school district announcements never disappear unless she puts in a video.

The boys stare at all this – though if there is one thing grabbing the majority attention it must be the fluorescent lights that flicker and hum above all else.

“I’m doing every thing I can to get their attention,” she says, but I am gone. The flickering of the overhead lights has synched momentarily with the computer screen flash rate, and it is intoxicating.

Star

I am sitting in the kind of grim space often devoted to special education – a basement room that was surely intended in the plan of the building as a closet. I am doodling. One of the doodles is a star. She looks at it. “Could he copy that?” she asks, “if you showed it to him?” “Oh yeah,” I say, “he’s great at drawing things – try him with a Budweiser label.” She doesn’t laugh though she knows I’m making a joke. “Then why can’t he look at this and type it?” She writes on a pad – star – and turns it toward me. Now I laugh. “There’s no ‘star’ key on the keyboard.” “What?” “There’s no key that has the word ‘star’ on it. He only sees these words as shapes, he doesn’t understand letters.” She looks from the paper to me and back again. All that college, I think, and no one ever told her anything about the kids. “Even if he could pick it apart into letters,” I tell her, “even if he could – and he can’t – those letters aren’t on the keyboard.” She has no idea. I ask the question I always ask, “What letters aren’t on the keyboard?” I wait, but not long. She doesn’t know, waiting is just cruelty. “The small letters, lower case letters. The only letter in ‘star’ he could find would be the ‘S’.” I know she is turning this over in her head. Teachers always tell kids that the alphabet has 26 letters. What liars. And they wonder why so many can’t read.

Correction

I actually tried to answer the question. I mean, I knew this. I said, “The Great War.” The teacher said, “That’s wrong,” and smirked. The other kids laughed, how fucking dumb could I be? “Limey retard,” some boy laughed. A girl answered, “World War I.” Fuck everyone.
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copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - photograph, of course, by Owen Higgins.
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