I can still remember the excitement I felt after persuading my parents to buy a then-almost-top-of-the-range Pentium computer with its speedy 75mhz processor. Eleven years later, of course, my mobile phone has a processor at least three times as fast as that. One thing you can almost guarantee is that pretty much every student you come across will have a mobile phone. In my school they’re not even supposed to be in school but – as you can imagine – they are used surreptitiously in between lessons. In what follows I’m going to try to outline a few ways in which we can use the technology students already have to motivate them, make life easier, and enhance their learning! :D

Over the last few months I’ve covered quite a few ways in which mobile phone can be used in the classroom. Here’s a quick recap of some of them…

1. Learning slideshows for mobile phones and iPods

In this post I looked at ways in which Powerpoint presentations can be saved as a series of images of a size and format suitable for screens of mobile phones or iPods. This is especially useful for revision purposes as teens tend to ‘play’ with their phones when waiting or bored. This gives them something productive to look at! :p

2. QR: what’s that?

QR codes are like mini squre barcodes which can hold a decent amount of information. Camera phones can have software freely installed on them to recognise these codes and decipher them into meaningful text/links/images.

This could be useful for homework or for embedding a ‘live’ link on a paper-based worksheet. It does, however, mean that your students have to install some software on their phone – but I’m sure they’ll help one another with that… ;)

3. Setting up an Educational Blog

If you’re setting up a blog-based website, you might as well make it mobile device-friendly. My learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk site, for example (as well as this one), runs on WordPress and has the WP-Mobile plugin installed. This means that mobile devices are automatically detected and suitably-formatted pages displayed! Your students can then access your website through the school computers, their home computer and their mobile phone – so they’ve no excuse for forgetting that homework, really!

4. Using technology students already have for learning

In this post I looked more at the possibilities than the practice of using mobile phones in the classroom. What I said still stands, however:

Although I don’t do so now, I’ve managed to post to a blog I had on Blogger via my phone by sending an email to a specified email address. (you can now send pictures, too) I’ve shared files with others via bluetooth and transferred pictures and videos via USB to my PC. Imagine the possibilities: field trips where students post to their blogs/wikis whilst they’re there; creating mini-documentaries using the camera in their phone; be in different places working on the same project and be talking via instant-messaging; the list goes on!

And now a couple of things I haven’t mentioned so far, or have only mentioned in passing:

5. Podcasting/listening to educational MP3 audio

Mobile phones are more and more becoming ‘entertainment devices’. However, this means that they have the software we can use as educators to engage students even more! Some mobile phones can already subscribe to podcasts and a fair few can listen to streaming MP3s from the Internet. Even if these features are missing, pretty much every mobile phone you can buy nowadays can be hooked up to a computer and have MP3s sent to it to listen to on the go. Why not use this feature, combined with a website, to either publish your students’ creations, or to extend their course beyond the four walls of your classroom? :D

6. Sharing files via Bluetooth

Given the amount of time teenagers spend using their mobile phones it’s fair to say they’re likely to come pretty adept at using them; just because you don’t know how to use all the features of your phone doesn’t mean that they don’t! For the uninitiated, Bluetooth is a networking protocol, a way of sharing files and information over a short range (a few metres). Some laptops, such as my Macbook, have Bluetooth built-in. As mobile phones become more and more powerful I can envision a time when I ask students to ‘send their homework to my laptop’ at the start of a lesson. I already get a fair number of students emailing me their homework, so this seems like a natural extension…

If you’re in a school like my current one, with a strict policy on mobile phone usage in school which is adhered to 99% of the time, then the above won’t be happening anytime soon without a major change in policy. If, however, you’re in a school with a bit of a ‘problem’ regarding mobile phone usage in lessons and around school you might want to try out some of these suggestions. If students are going to use their phones they might as well be using them for something useful! :p

(and if you have or plan to implement any of these suggestions, please let us know how you get on…)