In our small, rural, community school we have no set cell phone policy. Students are allowed to bring devices to school and use them during their free-time. However, they are not allowed to use the school’s wifi. There are no restrictions set on teachers though in the past I have felt judged for using it during meetings. I have just made it a point to talk to people about how I use good docs and evernote to record important things and have them sync across my devices. In the classroom setting, teachers make their own rules.
We are lucky in that we have enough shiny new macbook airs for each student to use one. Therefore I haven’t really gotten into the use of cellphones. The lack of wifi for students is also an issue and will most likely not be resolved as our internet is already quite slow (I tried to get them access last year and was not allowed). About ¾ of my high school classes have cell phones and the rest at least have an iPod. I have used them as digital readers and to run a few educational apps like duolingo. However I think that there is so much more that could be done if I could get around our infrastructure issues (maybe a petition for them to put in the fiber optic cables?). I also worry about the texting that goes on as it is near impossible to know if they are working on their cell phone or texting a friend. I am definitely the most technologically progressive teacher in our school so I think I would have to pave the way to more mobile technology in class. I am interested though. One great thing about the MET program is we get to reflect more analytically about our practice. I often feel inspired while doing an assignment or reflection. I think I will head off to school tomorrow and develop an assignment for Snapchat because my students love that right now. I want students to create a snapchat story to interpret a challenging scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ll try to do that this week and let you all know here how it goes 🙂
While there isn’t that much happening in my community, there has been some mobile learning happening within the territory. The communities in the Yukon come together for REM (Rural Experiential Model) and offer week long workshops for students. One offered this year was the Social Media experiment. They unblocked all of the social media and had a group of students acting as reporters, with their devices, visiting the different workshops. They also encouraged all the students there to tweet, facebook, and snapchap about the REM with their devices. The teacher’s goal was to prove that social media could be used for educational purposes. He wanted to create a case for schools to unblock social networks and encourage teachers to incorporate them into their lessons. While the networks haven’t been unblocked, I think the experiment was a success. Students worked very well with their devices and and the social media group created a final documentation of the event here: <https://sway.com/3iUeAdmd9vbieogQ>