Mobile phones in the classroom? Discuss

In Education Podcast Reflections 28b, Lynne Horn, Principal Teacher of the Languages Faculty at Tobermory High School, Isle of Mull talks to David Noble, teacher from Hillside School, Aberdour and Booruch podcaster about the use of mp3 players, mobile phones and blogging in her language lessons. Lynne starts off by giving us some background information on how she has been interested in using technology to aid language learning for a long time now, particularly after becoming involved in the Partners in Excellence Project run by Mark Pentleton.

Inspired by the success of the PiE Verbcast a series of twenty episodes for learning French verbs using relaxation techniques, Lynne tells us that she first decided to buy some iPods and mp3 players to improve her pupils' listening and pronunciation skills. Synchronising the players with iTunes meant that she could offer a whole range of listening material such as foreign language podcasts to her pupils for free, enriching them culturally and creating new language learning opportunities. When one of her pupils downloaded a contemporary French song from iTunes and put it on her mobile phone having first heard it played in class, this really got Lynne thinking ...

Following discussions with Ewan McIntosh through the MFLE on the potential of recording speech with mobile phones and Mark Pentleton about exchanging the resulting sound files using Bluetooth technology, Lynne thought she would investigate how she could use this technology to:

• send her pupils verb drills, vocabulary, dialogues and short listening exercises as mp3 files.
• ask her pupils to record themselves chanting verbs or practising role plays in French which they could then send to Lynne in class instantly via a Bluetooth adapter with a 10 metre range or listen to at home for extra practice.
• enable her pupils to take part in peer assessment based on shared criteria by giving immediate feedback on spoken work they could listen to as a class from a laptop.

In Lynne's words one of the major benefits of recording pupils in this way is that:

‘It's very instant. You can record and we can put it straight on the computers to play back for the class to listen to and to refer back to, to comment on. Very useful in terms of assessment is for learning' 

So far, Lynne has experimented with two classes and has found that the pupils have responded positively particularly the boys. Her first class used their phones to help them learn irregular verbs. Pupils recorded themselves chanting the irregular conjugations so they could listen back to them later on. In Lynne's opinion, this not only gave value to the traditionally difficult task of learning verb conjugation, it also helped her pupils' pronunciation and test scores.

In her second trial class, Lynne asked groups of two or three pupils to use their phones to record speaking tests to gauge what impact it would have on their learning in subsequent lessons. She found that those pupils who had listened to the recordings that they had made in their own time really benefitted from the experience.

Building on these initial successes, Lynne now hopes to expand the use of mp3 players, iPods and mobile phones in the learning of Gaelic at Tobermory. One of the Gaelic teachers has already used them to record native speakers for use in class and the school will be taking part in a Gaelic podcasting project with Jim Henderson from the Highland Council in the future.

Lynne stresses that although there are no health and safety or child protection issues in using mobile phones in class, it is up to the teacher to establish clear rules such as when the phones should be turned on and off to avoid misuse. She does however mention the decision of certain authorities to restrict or block access to popular sites such as YouTube, Google Video and Google Images as a 'major stumbling block'.

In addition to Lynne's adventures in using mobile technology, she has also set up three blogs to reflect on her own learning as well as her pupils'.

Lynne's blogs are:

• Tobermoryhs - a school blog used by all classes which is designed to allow pupils to leave their comments on other pupils' work or to give answers to questions posed by Lynne
• Tobermory Educational Languages - a mother blog designed to coordinate learner blogs written by sixth formers learning Italian (Emma, Geri, Lauren, Laura), a language not typically offered in Tobermory. Posts are intended to be about what the students are learning and what they find useful. The blogs are reflective tools allowing them to look back at what they’ve done and set themselves learning targets for the future. Lynne admits she has to remind the girls to update their blogs from time to time!
• Lynne Horn - a personal/professional blog where Lynne can record her thoughts and reflect on her own practice.

Lynne started blogging after working with Peter Ford and John Johnson at the Communicate.06 conference at Stirling University in March 2006. They convinced her that having a class blog would be a good idea. So she set one up to showcase her pupils' work and to ask them questions. Lynne also found that by letting her pupils leave comments helped her when writing school reports as by doing so they were each laying out a personal learning plan.

Although Lynne declares she is still at the preparation stage of using new technologies in the classroom, she is clearly a trailblazer in her field. By experimenting with mobile phones, mp3 players, iPods and blogging, she is creating new learning opportunities for her pupils which no doubt they very much appreciate. To explore the use of mobile phones in the classroom could be considered a controversial move by some who may be concerned of being secretly recorded by their pupils, photographed or videoed. These are legitimate worries. Yet should the fear of letting our pupils use their phones in class deter us from considering the motivational and language learning benefits of doing so?

Comments welcome as always

To see the show notes from Lynne and David's discussion, click here

Comments

[Alex Blagona]

As in favour as I am about new technology in the classroom, I am in favour of blocking sites like YouTube in schools. The ability to record video and subsequently broadcast it across a network is surely sufficient and will serve the same aim. Students at my school have been known to waste away time on these video sites, and the material that is available to them is not always appropriate in a school. Opponents may argue that they can easily access these same sites from home, but as schools we have a public responsibility to maintain. The Becta website has some useful guidelines on the uses of mobile technology in schools. If you don't already have it Joe, I can email you the link.

[Joe Dale]

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your comment. I've just found this link to advice on using mobile phones in school which has been produced by Becta:
http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=te&catcode=as_mob_hh_03&rid=9954&pagenum=1&NextStart=1

I agree that there is clearly a problem with any video site which contains some risqué material if it is going to be used in school.

There is a site however called 'Embed the video' which means you can run a video from your own blog or website as long as you have enough storage space to host it. Here is the link:

http://embedthevideo.com/

Read point 2 of this post for more explanation about Embed the video:
http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/pivot/entry.php?id=1031&w=john_johnston

[Lynne]

I think that there is also a lot of potential on sites such as YouTube and we need to model responsible use with pupils. In fact I don't want all of YouTube unblocked, but think it should be possible to unblock pages we want to use - and as professionals we're not going to show anything unsuitable.

Problem with blocking YouTube is that there are loads of other sites which do the same thing which aren't blocked.

I also discovered something interesting the other week. I was trying to describe a video to a class and they said, "You can show us Miss, you can override the school system" and they were right. Turns out there are hundreds of sites which advertise themselves on the basis of accessing blocked materials in school. The school is now blocking these as soon as they find them, but I bet there are hundreds more!