I work for the Toronto District School Board, the biggest board in Canada, with over a quarter of a million students (Yau, Rosolen & Archer, 2013). It’s a big, bloated juggernaut of a school board, a result of an amalgamated city in the late 1990s. It has been riddled with controversy throughout its existence and there is at this point a strong argument for breaking up the board (Ross, 2015). Among myriad other problems is a lack of a consistent policy on technology. According to the Handbook of Community Partners in TDSB schools, “It is strongly recommended that all staff, volunteers, and community partners turn off their devices (or put in vibrating mode) during assigned work hours in the school. The Principal will explain how the cell phone policy applies to the specific school.” (TDSB, 2011). And if the Principal doesn’t, or is unclear? Then it’s the wild west.
This year I teach French, Drama and Music to grades 3-6 at an Alternative elementary school where our Principal is split between our school and another and is seldom present, so pretty much all policies are determined by teachers for their own classrooms, including use of devices. I use one of the school’s 12 iPads almost daily, mostly for video of presentations and students singing songs which play back as I give them feedback, then upload to Google classroom to post on class blogs for parents and students to see. I have tried giving small groups their own iPads to record and self-assess but students tend to get off task by opening other apps or going online.
For the 3 previous years, I worked at a grade 7 and 8 school, and while the aforementioned “turn off devices” policy ruled for the first couple of years, a new principal started flirting with BYOD. As a French immersion teacher, I would use my “Word Reference” dictionary app whenever my French vocabulary failed me, or take pictures of the board to post them on the LMS we used before erasing the board. I would sometime allow students to use their phones for photographing or filming presentations, or use my own phone and play back video of student presentations through a projector for self and peer assessment. I’d allow students to take pictures of missed work on the board to send to their absent friends. Sometimes when we had the mobile laptops in the class, certain student preferred using the school’s wifi on their own phones for research, and I allowed it. I also allowed students to use them as calculators when most of the class set were stolen or destroyed. For a geometry unit, I had one partner describe the rotations, reflections and translations (en français) while the other partner played Tetris. As Ciampa (2013) asserts, these activities provided combinations of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for learning over their analog counterparts.
In a public school setting, access to a mobile device continues to be an issue. I can’t see BYOD working the way it did in the video “Cell Phones in the Classroom : Learning Tools for the 21st Century” (2009) because for economic, health or other reasons, up to 40% (Goodman, 2009) of my middle school students would not have cell phones. At an age where social acceptance is bigger than any lesson in school, it would be totally irresponsible for a teacher to tell a child that he needs a phone, or to leave a child out of an activity because she doesn’t have access to one. If the school doesn’t have enough tablets for ALL the children, any argument 0f motivation, constructivism, or any other benefit ascribed to using mobile devices is moot.
References:
Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved fromhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf
Goodman, ?. (2009, December 12). Cell Phones in the Classroom : Learning Tools for the 21st Century. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXt_de2-HBE
Ross, S. (2015, April 17). What to do with TDSB? A new panel mulls breaking it up and other possible reforms. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/what-to-do-with-tdsb-a-new-panel-mulls-breaking-it-up-and-other-possible-reforms/article24007422/
TDSB. (2011). Handbook of Community Partners in TDSB schools. Retrieved from: http://www.tdsb.on.ca/Portals/0/Nursing/4b%20CUOS_Handbook-FINAL.pdf
Yau, Rosolen & Archer. (2013). TDSB Students and Families: Demographic Profile. 2011-12 Student & Parent Census. Retrieved from: http://www.tdsb.on.ca/Portals/0/AboutUs/Research/2011-12CensusFactSheet1-Demographics-17June2013.pdf