Recently I had to provide a rationale for a purchase of an iPhone for the ETMC. In my mind this was pretty obvious if I am to be up on emerging technologies for the College of Education. In my research for this rationale I discovered this web site listing the new cell phone subscriptions per minute around the world. Of interest to me is that North America (46/min) was not the leader in new subscriptions, rather it was behind Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia/Pacific (whopping 388/min). This information was on the Forbes web site with credit being given to Gartner Research Group.
Another study that I perused was from the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research in a study titled “The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007". This survey included 27,846 students from 103 institutions. Some interesting tidbits that stood out for me was a chart listing what electronic devices students own. The items included: simple cell phones (86%), desktop computer (61%), Laptop computer (74%), electronic music/video device (76%), electronic game (56%), PDA (12%), Smartphone (12%). I was also intrigued with the findings regarding the number of the above listed devices owned per student – three devices (22%), four devices (39%) and five or more devices (29%).
Ok – this was a “duh” conclusion… we better recognize that these tools are ubiquitous among our learners so how are we to leverage these tools for learning? What are your thoughts? How many learners in your classroom(s) have these electronic devices at their disposal? You could use InspireData to collect this information pretty quickly among your class participants. It would be interesting to compare notes then…
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
My guess is that close to 3/4 of high school students in Rockingham County carry a cell phone with them. I think the barrier to their use in the classroom is behavior management more than anything. I believe that most teachers would consider this as just one more thing to police and that is a real issue. It would be great if students were mature enough to take out their phones for certain learning activities and willingy put them away during assessments and when asked to. There would always be kids who would try to cheat with them and/or be text messaging at inappropriate times.
However, if kids are getting bored during instruction and are turning to text messaging on their cell phones as an alternative it is worth trying to make some use of them. Again, this is a situation where the education might look toward business/marketing in servicing their "customers". Where will we be getting notifications of nearby restaurants or shopping centers in the near future? You got it ... cell phones!
Post a Comment