More on Cell Phones

When I started experimenting with text messaging, I would text this student or that student, usually one or two at a time. Once I got all of my seniors' numbers, I decided to try a broadcast. During my class, second period, I talked with the seniors about a variety of topics, so I thought I would follow up on one of them in text message to all of them. 

During third period, I thought of some points that I wanted to make, so I gave them a blast. It turns out that the coordinator of our academy had all the seniors during third period. Around the midway point of her class, every students' cell phone went off, almost simultaneously! She said, "The ringing! The ringing!"

After she climbed down from the ceiling, she called my classroom and gave me a dressing down. By the end of the period, when she came over to her office, which is in my classroom, she had been thinking about the potential of being able to contact all of the students at once. To her credit, instead of chewing me out, she walked in with lots of questions about how it worked.

Now I regularly "ping" our students with updates to schedules, assignment reminders, even wake-up calls. They answer with questions of their own. They even "ping" me regularly to let me know what they are up to. My phone vibrates, though, so I never get "the ringing!"

Cell phones are so powerful, I think it's a shame to keep them away from students. Sure, there will be abuses, just like every other aspect of high school, but by leveraging their phones instead of banning them, we coop their technology into an educational tool, instead of a nuisance.

Every new tool has met with resistance. Even paper and pencil was resisted by teachers who up until that time had their students using slate and chalk. Not that long ago, teachers were resisting the use of projectors that showed images from their computers. When I first started teaching in 2000, I taught in a middle school where there were only three projectors available for teachers to use. I went to the tech coordinator (remember when we had those?) and asked for one. He sternly told me that I could use it until another teacher asked for it, then I would have to share. I was at the school for two years, nobody ever asked.

When the school I am at now opened two years ago, I told the teachers in my small learning community that I could show them how to get class notes onto their students' iPods, as a .txt file. That way they could review the notes on a tool that they carried around with them all the time. My suggestion was met with universal disdain and dismissal.

I only want to fight the battles I know, or least think, that I can win. Nobody is going to stop students from bringing their cell phones to school, so why not turn the tables on them and use their own strength to make them learn? It's very judo-like, and just like in judo, it works.