Encouraging Distraction? Classroom Experiments with Mobile Media - ProfHacker - The Chr... - 0 views
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I think the best place to start when thinking about incorporating technology into the classroom is by asking the question, “What is the right tool for this particular job?” Sometimes it’s a digital tool and sometimes it’s not. But when we force a digital tool into a classroom scenario where it isn’t the best one for the job, students are extremely quick to pick up on this “tech for tech’s sake” implementation.
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And the faster and more intense our connectedness becomes, the further we move away from that ideal. Digital busyness is the enemy of depth.”
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Instead, if used in a dynamic way that addresses the medium’s strengths, mobile media can actually get us to engage with each other and with the spaces we move through in deep, meaningful, and context-rich ways.
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It is apparent that the students often shift between the two classroom spheres. Does this “distraction” take them away from engaging with the content I’m presenting? Quite the contrary. From my experience, they are engaged with the material that is being discussed in a much more sustained way because the devices that have typically severed as “distractions” in the past (e.g. using the laptop or the mobile phone to access Facebook) are now being utilized to constantly engage them with the material.
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The quiz began with a QR code posted on my office door (I started here so they would all know where my office was located!) that led them to a download of the 7scenes app.
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from Broadcastr to Foursquare
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When they arrived to class on the day of the field test, we all went geocaching around campus.
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The three groups each decided to create fictional narratives and used a range of mobile media from websites designed for the iPad, geocaches that contained narrative elements, and one group even built a reverse geocache that held the contents of the story.
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Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, every teacher in higher education will have to develop a strategy for mobile phone use in the classroom (whether that be to integrate the technology or to ban it).
