I am in Boston for a few days attending the Apple Summer Institute for Administrators. Apple knows how to put on a good event. Very nice hotel and very good food. They gave us a MacBook, iPod Touch, and an iPad to use for the two days of the conference. The conference centers around how to use Apple products to improve instruction and learning. Being a PC user who owns an iPhone, it has been interesting using their software on the MacBook. I have used Apple products before and I have always liked them. I can't believe how easy it is to use iMovie to create your own movies. My next computer purchase will definitely be an Apple. No surprise that Apple announced today that their MacBook sales are up. Their products are easier to use and more powerful.

I took the picture above at the Walgreens where I just picked up a prescription. What a great idea and a good use of mobile technology.

Collegiate High School Principal Tracie Rodriguez said the science and English departments use texting the most with class assignments. Teachers can choose whether they want students to text them. The trend began with a student asking if it would be OK for them to text their teacher, she said.

She said at one time students were coming to class with incomplete assignments and texting was a way for the students to feel comfortable with getting in touch with teachers outside of class, she said.

The school does still enforce a rule that cell phones can’t be used in class unless approved beforehand as part of a class assignment or in an emergency, she said.

In addition, parents haven’t expressed concerns about their student’s cell phone bills or texting charges, she said.

A recent article in Edutopia.org talks about using iPods as voice recording devices to provide feedback to students who are learning to read. According to the article the students can listen to themselves reading and it provides the "missing mirror" in terms of reading instruction. The last thing students with poor reading skills want to do is read aloud in front of their peers. Having students read into an iPod provides a non-threatening outlet for students to listen to themselves read. Apparently this process also improved the students ability to read.

Evidence of Student Outcomes

Escondido and Canby classrooms are seeing large gains in the speed of student reading, one part of reading fluency. In a Canby fourth-grade classroom of sixteen students, from the fall to mid-year assessment of reading fluency, when average increase in word count per minute (WCPM) is 12, the average in the iPod classroom was close to 20. (WCPM measures the pace of reading; accuracy is another component of fluency.) Most students achieved more than double the average expected.

In an Escondido fourth-grade class of ten students, average increase was 48 WCPM in just six weeks. At the start of fourth grade, all of the students lagged behind the 120 WCPM goal for third-grade completion. Within the six-week period, more than half of them had caught up and surpassed the goal for fourth-grade completion, making more than a year's progress in that period.

A pilot study of reading achievement using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills also showed impressive gains. A group of 12 fifth-graders in Escondido using iPod Touches averaged 1.8 years of reading progress in six months, compared with a matched group of students at the same school who averaged .25, a quarter of a year’s increase. Both districts are planning larger-scale studies of reading achievement.

The iPod makes personal a process that has been painfully public. No struggling reader likes to have his or her weaknesses exposed in a group, in front of the entire class or their reading circle. The iPod enables more intimate, 1:1 reading instruction between a student and a teacher listening to each other's voices in audio files.

We have heard teacher after teacher say, 'This has totally transformed my teaching!' 'I'm having more fun and being a better teacher.' 'I'm never gonna retire.'" One teacher told Shirley, '"Using iPods with microphones has engaged students more than anything I've ever experienced! These tools allow even the softest speaker to be heard and motivate even the most reluctant reader." Another said succinctly: "There's less of me talking and more of them doing."

I observed a lesson the other day in a Spanish 2 class. The lesson dealt with using the imperfect tense i.e. describing activities that one used to do in the past. Each student first had to pick two slips of paper - one with an activity on it, the other with a classmate's name on it. They then had to draw a picture of the classmate doing the activity. Using their cell phone, the students then called into the teacher's Google Voice account and described what the classmate used to do using the imperfect tense. The students, a few at a time, went out into the hallway to place the calls. Afterwards they turned in their drawings which the teacher numbered. While the students were drawing their pictures the teacher had Spanish music videos playing through her LCD projector on the front screen. The songs contained vocabulary words the students were currently learning and primarily used the imperfect tense. The next day in class the teacher played each call to the class. The students had to listen to the call and decide which picture the call was describing. If they guessed correctly the student then had to further add to the description using another original sentence in either the imperfect or the preterite, which they had studied earlier in the year. Correct answers were tallied and winners received homework passes. During day one of the lesson I asked the teacher how she would have done the audio recordings without the cell phones and she responded by saying she would not have been able to do the lesson. After thinking for a while she said she could have used digital recorders but would have had to download each file from the recorders in order to play them back to the students, which would have made it a much more time consuming process.

This Nature video, Mobile Medicine, samples the more than 2,000 iPhone apps that are making medicine increasingly mobile.

 

Via: Cell Phones

The Innovative Educator has put together a well written lesson plan for using cell phones to prepare middle school students for standardized tests. Below is a snippet from the website:

Another in the Innovative Educator's "Cells in Ed Lesson Series." This lesson is designed for science teachers who are interested in harnessing the power of cell phones in instruction to prepare for a standardized test and was used in a class where the teacher allowed students to bring cell phones to class.

 

via Liz Kolb

Some interesting thoughts from the writer of the uLearning Blog. Follow the link to read the full post. Most enlightening was the writer's response to the growing proliferation of iPod Touches and iPhones in classrooms:

And what should an educator’s response be? Possibly you’re already in the middle of deploying one of these options – and if so, my biggest suggestion is – reflect. While our sector has stood still for so long, the current rush might make us forget our usual values of tying everything we do to our learning vision first. So reflect first, then on how these devices can enhance learning – don’t make learning fit to them.

It is refreshing to have an educator say that we need to reflect first and tie everything we do to our learning vision. So often in schools we run after the latest educational technology fad. In education we need more sustained deep reflection before embarking on any technology initiatives. Do small pilots to test a hypothesis and find critical stress points.

I also like the writer's comment that we should not make learning fit the device. I am not a big proponent of electronic whiteboards or Smartboards. I feel these devices are an example of trying to make learning fit the device. We spent years trying to get teachers away from the front of the classroom controlling everything and now we anchor them to the front of the room using an electronic whiteboard. Backwards innovation.

The people at the Slide to Learn website have put together this PDF as a comprehensive guide for using Apple's mobile products in the classroom. Follow the link and give it a look, It is very well done.

 Teachers are finding interesting and creative ways to include mobile phones in classroom instruction in an effort to bridge the divide between the technologies children use at home and what they use in school, education technology experts say.

This article in the NY Times provides a great overview about the use of cell phones in school. The article is laid out like a lesson plan. It provides activities and questions to be used with your students to educate them on how cell phones can be used in a school setting.

This NY Times article talks about how important the basic cellphone in countries besides the United States. The article states:

A recent report by the World Economic Forum and Insead, the French business school, concluded that Americans rank below 71 other nations in their level of cellphone penetration, even though they lead in other areas of connectivity. Some Americans are not connected at all. Millions of others are beyond the phone, so to speak: though they own one and use it, they also own other devices, and the phone is not be-all-end-all.

But it is from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa — the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. In such places, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology. The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, an intergovernmental organization. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

And because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier of global innovation.

As I read the article I couldn't help but think how the lack of funds and infrastructure has forced these other countries to be more creative in utilizing cellular technology for the greater good. The basic cell phone is a powerful tool if one knows how to use it.

I believe as funds continue to dry up for local school districts they will be forced to think outside the box and this will lead them to embrace student-owned cell phones. The acceptance of cell phones in school will further be accelerated by lower cell phone costs as cellular plans and handsets continue to decrease.