Monday 18 May 2009

How mobile phones help learning in secondary schools

This study was commissioned by Becta through a research grant related to the UK Government's e-strategy "Harnessing Technology".

This study was commissioned by Becta through a research grant related to the UK Government's e-strategy "Harnessing Technology".

In spite of school policies banning mobile phones in class, teachers in three schools explored ways of using students' own phones and borrowed smart phones for learning. As a result, students had permission to use the mobiles for activities such as: timing experiments with the stopwatch; photographing apparatus, models, and experiments for reports; bluetoothing project material between group members; receiving SMS & email reminders from teachers; synchronising timetables and setting reminders; connecting remotely to the school learning platform; accessing revision sites on the Internet; creating short narrative movies; downloading foreign language podcasts; using GPS to identify locations, and transferring files between school and home.
School heads and parents were supportive of the project, and in fact some parents asked why their students were not involved!
In every case, other teachers became interested and involved, and the project teachers decided to continue using mobile phones. These champions of change have shown that, with good planning and anticipating class management and technical issues, using mobile phones can be a very productive way to augment access to tools for computing, communication and photography. As one student said 'It is good to use new technologies. It prepares us for the future as we will be using mobile phones more and more.'
Copyright for this report resides with the University of Nottingham. For reuse permission please contact elizabeth.hartnell-young@nottingham.ac.uk
Download the report in Word (964KB) PDF (525KB) or ODT (848KB)

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