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.

Send in the Clouds

Cloud computing is a natural step in the evolution of the digital workspace. As server space and Internet connections get cheaper, it makes sense to move work off the desktop and into the cloud. And with the proliferation of free services, most notably the Google suite of office apps, it doesn't even have to cost to go all cumulonimbus.

As recently as 2007, a story in the NY Times (http://nyti.ms/dD6ZYz) asked "Why Can’t We Compute in the Cloud?" But from another piece published later that year, Google was already explaining the cloud in terms we could all understand. "'Cloud computing' — essentially software hosted on the server instead of on the desktop — is a natural outgrowth of Google’s model and network of datacenters around the globe." (http://nyti.ms/bXaY4y). And in an NPR story from last year, "Cloud computing has also been likened to utility computing, whereby individuals and companies purchase additional network bandwidth, storage and computation capacity as on-demand services — the same way people buy more electricity to fuel their power needs. Historically, different companies have handled these elements" (http://bit.ly/cLePL7).

With the advent of the netbook, a laptop with a little memory and not much storage, the cloud makes a lot of sense. I'm posting this on a Dell netbook with 8gb of storage, It's too small to store anything, so almost all of my docs are on Google. I got 1gb of storage for free, but paid $5 to get 20gb!

"Cloud computing is a vehicle for using that technology. It enables users to work and collaborate completely online, without the need for special software, and independent of platform. Not only does distributed learning occur anywhere and at any time, but these conditions can be modified along a number of dimensions" (Oblinger, Barone, & Hawkins, 2001)

Needless to say, I'm a believer!

iPad vs Netbooks

I've been thinking a lot about what Steve Jobs said during the roll out of the iPad. He said, "Everybody uses a laptop and/or a smart phone. And the question has arisen, lately, is there room for a device in the middle? We've questioned this for years ourselves, but the bar is pretty high. Some thought it would be the netbook. The problem is, netbooks aren't better at anything. They're slow, they're clunky. They're just cheap laptops." He then went on to extol the virtues of the iPad, saying that it is "way better than a laptop, way better than a smart phone".

I must admit that the iPad looks terrific, and I can't wait to get my hands on one, but after listening to Jobs et al for more than an hour, it occurred to me that there is very little that my netbook does that isn't better than the iPad. It's got a faster processor, it displays Flash on websites, it has a real keyboard, it can run any of the thousands of open-source applications available free from the Internet, it can attach to a printer, I can (and have) change the operating system, and so on. In fact, the only things that my netbook can't do as well as the iPad are battery life (Jobs claims ten hours for the iPad, my netbook only gets four), ability to show movies (my Linux netbook doesn't do that very well at all), and its weight (the iPad weighs eight ounces less than my netbook). The iPad can also connect wirelessly using 3G, and while my netbook doesn't do that, many do.

Any talk of the iPad is speculation, of course, since we won't get to try one for another month or two, but it does beg the question, is the iPad worth getting? It is drool-worthy, and very cool, in an Apple sort of way. Time will tell if the iPad is the game changer that Jobs claims it is, or just an iPod that nobody has a pocket big enough to fit it into. We'll know when (if) we see iPads popping out on street corners, in restaurants, on subways, and maybe even in schools.

But what if the iPad was so cool that students would never leave home without it? What if we could put every textbook a student would need in their high school career on it? What if students could use it to communicate with each other, and the teacher? What if it made students work harder, by encouraging them to turn it on and play around with it? What if lunch time found hundreds of students huddled into groups around campus collaborating wirelessly? What if it actually made students want to come to school?

It might be a game changer after all!

A pencil is a word processor

Suppose I were to offer you a fantastic word processor, capable of operating in any language, readily available, that people from 1 to 100 could easily use, that is small, portable, and needs no batteries. There is such a word processor. It is called a pencil.

Now suppose I were to offer you a personal computer, so powerful that it could be used for any number of tasks, is portable, and user friendly. And nearly every one of your students already has one, so you don't even have to supply them. It's the cell phone! It is the most pervasive computer in the world.

Most teachers are well aware of cell phones, mostly as a nuisance in class, where they spend a lot of time taking them away from students. Well, you wouldn't take away their pencil, so why take away the cell phone?

The cell phone may be used as a computation device, a camera, a text messaging device, portable storage, a music player, a word processor, and probably more. Why on earth would I take that away from my student? Besides, as you probably already know, it's a losing battle, so why fight it?

Of my 150 students, about two-thirds have a cell phone. I have their numbers, and they have mine. If a student is habitually late to school, I give them a call to wake them up. If a student is absent, I send a text message to ask where they are. If a student has a problem that they need help with, they get in touch with me directly. I remind them of upcoming assignments. Other teachers, who know what I am doing, ask me to get in touch with students for various reasons.

The obvious objection from teachers is that phones are a distraction in class. In my day, I doodled, with a pencil. You know, that other word processor.