Run Like Crazy

jbizzle329:

iamlittlei:

world-shaker:

As I watched my students work cooperatively, independently, quietly and noisily in my results-only classroom, an e-mail landed in my inbox, quickly followed by another and several more — all on the same subject.

“This place is out of control, and it has to stop,” was the gist of the lot. The students, it seems, are listening to their Mp3 players and iPods in the hallways, and the safety of the school, perhaps even that of the entire civilized world, is at stake. (Okay, that last part was poetic license run amok.)

A very short, very interesting read.

I think that mobile devices have great potential for education and classroom use.

I do not allow them in my classroom, as per my school’s policy. And I’m OK with the policy, for a few reasons:

• I refuse to build mobile devices into my lesson plans until I am working in a 1:1 environment. Until then, access to effective mobile technology is inherently unequal in my classroom.
• I think that I could create a classroom culture in which mobile devices were used productively. I am not confident that many of colleagues can, at least not without intensive PD, and that’s not on the horizon any time soon.

Case in point: I have a colleague this year who, in spite of our strict schoolwide ban on personal electronic devices, never tells a student that he or she cannot have the cell phone/iPod/what-have-you. When you walk through his classroom, the devices are not being used for educational purposes. Everyone has them out, and no one is doing anything related to physics. There is no learning taking place. Banning the phones in that room would not automatically create an actual learning environment, of course, but it would remove a distraction and signal to the students that the teacher is the authority in the room.

I don’t think that our goal should be to control the students. Certainly we want to be fostering independent learning and critical thought. But you need an adult in the room, and the most student-centered classrooms are successful because the students recognize the teacher’s authority to facilitate and manage the environment.

I teach at a Montessori school and yesterday we had a very important Montessori person come in and speak.  She is very against technology before the age of 12.  (I almost lost my cool).  No tv, cell phones, iPads, computers, etc….  Her argument was that why take the easy way out.  Kids should foster that learning by going to the library and using a book rather than just asking Google.  She also said that their brains are ready for digital communication.  They are still in such an impressionable age that they need to talk to people, not text or type an email.  I had some issues with what she was saying. I believe that in today’s society, kids and adults  not only have to be literate in reading, but also in technology.

My students have used technology devices in following ways this year:  text offers of sexual favors, film themselves getting stoned, and sending naked pictures of themselves to boys’ cell phones.  My kids are 12 and 13.  My opinion on technology…hmmmm, what do you think?