Getty

No device should ever be hailed as the silver bullet in “saving” education — nor should it be completely shunned — but when it comes to the possibility of bridging the digital divide between low-income and high-income students, devices may play a pivotal role.

Access to the Internet connects kids to all kinds of information — and for low-income students especially, that access has the power to change their social structure by allowing them to become empowered and engaged, said Michael Mills, a professor of Teaching and Learning at the University of Central Arkansas during a SXSWEdu session last week.

“For minorities and for low-income students who have these devices, it might be their only way to access the Internet, to get information about their own health, access to social media,” he said. “And they’re using that as the agent to change their social structure.”

Yet it’s those very students who are deprived of the right to use their own devices in schools, according to a recent Pew report showing that access to devices is noticeably different between higher and lower income schools: 52% of teachers of upper and upper-middle income students say their students use cell phones to look up information in class, compared with 35% of teachers of the lowest income students. And when it comes to blocking sites, 49% of teachers of students living in low-income households say their school’s use of Internet filters has a major impact on their teaching, compared with 24% of those who teach better off students who say that. In the same vein, 33% of teachers of lower income students say their school’s rules about classroom cell phone use by students have a major impact on their teaching, compared with 15% of those who teach students from the highest income households.

Why is this the case? It all comes down to expectations, Mills said, that could also be related to blatant racism.

“We have some significant issues with race relations, and the core of what it comes down to is that we have to redefine what we expect,” Mills said. “Just because a student is Tweeting or using another back-channel, or whatever doesn’t mean he’s not being productive. And it takes away from trusting that student to do what’s right for himself in his community. We need to be more trusting, more open and flexible.”

Schools don’t allow students of color to use their mobile devices because they think those students will not use them in what they consider appropriate ways, he said. “But the very fact that we’re saying they’re not being productive is to say that our values are more valuable than their values.”

And therein lies the divide.

“Access is a basic right. It’s the same as roads or clean water or electricity,” Mills said. “Those are [accessible] here in this country because we expect it. The same thing should apply to the Internet. The Internet is about empowerment. If we take away this access because we think certain people aren’t going to use it right, we’re no better than governments who take away voting rights from minorities.”

[RELATED: Students Demand to Use Technology in Schools]

The numbers line up: A recent study by QualComm showed that low-income students’ test scores increased by 30 percent after they were given smartphones to access more information and instruction and to collaborate with their peers.

And discipline issues actually diminished in some schools that have Bring Your Own Device programs. For example, in the Katy Independent School District in Texas, one of the pioneers of the BYOD effort that participated in a pilot program with Cisco, director of technology Lonnie Owens said their results were surprising. “Discipline issues went down and test scores went up, so we viewed it as a success,” Owens said.

Mills believes that the simple act of students using their coveted devices for study purposes makes learning more acceptable to them and to their peers. In neighborhoods where caring about school is most certainly not cool, Mills said “it’s becoming more socially acceptable to talk about school stuff outside school because of that device. When they text or tweet about it, somehow it crosses the boundary of becoming okay. It’s not exactly cool yet, but all of a sudden it’s becoming okay.”

HOW TO NARROW THE DIVIDE

For educators who want to start chipping away at the divide, Mills listed a number of ways.

1.   GIVE STUDENTS ACCESS.
Many Title 1 schools — those in low-income communities — receive funds and grants, but don’t always buy what they need. If they have enough funds, Mills said schools should invest in a 1-1 program — a device for every student.

2.   GIVE STUDENTS PROMPTS

Whether it’s the school that provides the device, or whether students are allowed to use their own, it’s important to give them guidance on how to use those devices for learning. “Students do not generally use their personal technology for learning activities unprompted,” he said. “We have to provide them with prompts.”

Educators should also be instrumental in guiding student etiquette with devices. For students who use text-speak and shorthand when handing in assignments, teachers can ask them to proofread and resend until the assignments are up to par. “We can teach them to use mobile literacy to help themselves,” he said.

3.   PROVIDE INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES.
“We need to think about what we are teaching,” Mills said. “This is not technology — this is Pedagogy 101.” Educators must understand the dotted line between an assigned activity and the instructional objective, which should be tied to learning skills.

4.   MAKE YOURSELF AVAILABLE.
Just giving kids a number where they can reach you has “exponential impact,” Mills said. “Just that small gesture tells kids you’re available.” For those who don’t feel comfortable giving students their phone numbers, Mills suggests using a Google voice account, which students can call and leave messages.

5.   INVITE OBSERVERS TO YOUR MOBILE ENHANCED CLASS.
Parents, other teachers, and administrators will learn a lot from watching how kids can plug into learning by using their devices. During their visits, talk about the upward trajectory of kids you’ve noticed who have benefited from the change.

6.   INVENTORY THE DEVICES.
Keep track of who owns what kind of device (especially after the holidays when kids receive new ones). This way, you can create flexible, shifting groups to make sure there’s a good variety of devices in every group. Don’t place all the iPhone 5 users in one group — mix them up to promote equity.

7.   USE DISCRETION.
Be careful not to publicly call out kids who don’t have a device when organizing groups. Use common sense and compassion.

8.   USE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE.
If the school has 10 Kindles, find ways to use them in your class. If it has six iPods or 30 computers, don’t let them collect dust. Even the oldest computers can be fired up for basic research.

9.   REFRAME PRODUCTIVITY.
Sitting quietly doesn’t exemplify productivity, Mills said. If you have flexible processes, you can give students different ways of understanding.

10.   TEACH PROCESS NOT CONTENT.
All educators, but especially those who teach low-income students, need to be open to students’ ideas of showing what they’ve learned. If they don’t want to write a blog, but want to create a video, be open to it.

11.   VALUE COLLABORATION.
Promote group work and project based learning.

You can find many more resources, ideas, and links on Mills’ website here.

Flickr: CriCristina

It may come as no surprise that the ideas that are top-of-mind for educators, parents, and policymakers are the very topics conveyed in the most popular MindShift posts this year. Giving kids the tools to create, teachers the freedom to innovate, making students’ work relevant in the real world, giving them access to valuable technology. These are the aspirations that have resonated most with MindShift readers this year. Here are the top 10 posts from 2012.

1. 1. EASY WAYS TO INTRODUCE PROGRAMMING TO KIDS.
   

2. Being able to use the Internet and operate computers is one thing, but it may be just as valuable to teach students how to code. Giving students an introduction to programming helps peel back the layers of what happens inside computers and how computers communicate with one another online. Programming knowledge, even at a very basic level, makes technology seem less magical and more manageable. Programming also teaches other important skills, including math and logic.

3. 2. 10 THINGS IN SCHOOL THAT SHOULD BE OBSOLETE.

4. So much about how and where kids learn has changed over the years, but the physical structure of schools has not. Looking around most school facilities — even those that aren’t old and crumbling –  it’s obvious that so much of it is obsolete today, and yet still in wide use.

5. 3. WHY KIDS NEED SCHOOLS TO CHANGE.

6. The conversation in education has shifted towards outcomes and training kids for jobs of the future, and in many ways the traditional classroom has become obsolete. And yet many people fear change, preferring to hunker down and take the conservative route. Yet, it’s exactly during these uncertain times when people must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental, said educator Madeline Levine.

7. 4. LEARNING SHOULD BE MESSY.

8. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects.

9. 5. MAKING CELL PHONES WORK IN THE CLASSROOM.

10. At its core, the issues associated with mobile learning get to the very fundamentals of what happens in class everyday. At their best, cell phones and mobile devices seamlessly facilitate what students and teachers already do in thriving, inspiring classrooms. Students communicate and collaborate with each other and the teacher. They apply facts and information they’ve found to formulate or back up their ideas. They create projects to deepen their understanding, association with, and presentation of ideas.

11. 6. TURN YOUR CLASSROOM INTO AN IDEA FACTORY.

12. If we’re serious about preparing students to become innovators, educators have some hard work ahead. Getting students ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges means helping them develop a new set of skills and fresh ways of thinking that they won’t acquire through textbook-driven instruction. Students need opportunities to practice these skills on right-sized projects, with supports in place to scaffold learning. They need to persist and learn from setbacks. That’s how they’ll develop the confidence to tackle difficult problems.

13. 7. OPEN EDUCATION RESOURCES FOR ALL.

14. As open educational resources and OpenCourseWare (OCW) increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.

15. 8. FOR STUDENTS, WHY THE QUESTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE ANSWER.

16. In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the center of attention, the owner of knowledge and information. Teachers often ask questions of their students to gauge comprehension, but it’s a passive model that relies on students to absorb information they need to reproduce on tests. What would happen if the roles were flipped and students asked the questions?

17. 9. DEFINING DEEPER LEARNING.

18. In preparing students for the world outside school, what skills are important to learn? This goes to the heart of the research addressed in the Deeper Learning Report released by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in Washington. Simply defined, “deeper learning” is the “process of learning for transfer,” meaning it allows a student to take what’s learned in one situation and apply it to another, explained James Pellegrino, one of the authors of the report. “You can use knowledge in ways that make it useful in new situations,” he said.

19. 10. HOW CAN WE CONNECT SCHOOL LIFE TO REAL LIFE.

20. So what if we were to say that, starting this year, even with our children in K– 5, at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can’t end up in a folder we put away? That the reason they’re doing their schoolwork isn’t just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

Today is Banned Website Awareness Day, and all across the country, educators are doing their part to raise awareness of how overly restrictive blocking of educational websites affects student learning.

The dialogue around filtering must also include bring-your-own-device policies, appropriate use of social media in schools, and overall responsible use of technology in school. Each of these issues plays an important part in the equation that influences school policy around filtering websites. For example, do students and teachers use social media sites like Edmodo or even Facebook for class purposes? Are educational videos on YouTube part of teachers’ curriculum? In large school districts, does it make sense to have individual school policies? Are students allowed to use their cell phones?

Part of the investigation into what filtering policies to put in place revolves around understanding current rules and regulations — and that’s the problem, according to Michelle Luhtala, a librarian at New Cannan High School and one of the primary organizers of Banned Websites Awareness Day.

“People believe the rules are far more restrictive than they really are,” she said. “Most people are working off of policies that predate 2003, and so much has happened since then, and continues to happen.”

In a recent survey of nearly 700 teachers, principals, and school librarians, conducted by MMS Education and co-sponsored by edWeb.net and MCH Strategic Data, 55% of respondents said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access to Web 2.0 tools (social media sites) for teachers, and 23% said they had very restrictive policies. And when it came to students, 44% said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access, and 47% said they had very restrictive policies.

Most of the blocked sites are either social media sites, or have some element of public sharing of information, and that’s where school administrators need to be more flexible, Luhtala said. “Administration more than teachers need to open their minds to the value and potential of social networking for educational use,” wrote a survey respondent. “CIPA needs to be spelled out more specifically or made clearer to IT in education so that filters are not blocking sites unnecessarily.”

In the meantime, what should educators do when they try to access a site in school that’s blocked by the school’s filter? Luhtala offers the following advice.

1. PRESENT FACTS. Direct people to the Department of Education’s suggestions in this article (posted below). “This is a really valuable resource for tech directors who aren’t well informed about the details of legal aspects,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes IT directors tell other IT directors who say, ‘Just do what the lawyers say,’ and it becomes a giant case of the game Telephone. The DOE is the ultimate authority, so this article forces them to look at their agenda and policies.”
2. CONSIDER SMART POLICIES. Study CoSN’s Guide for Acceptable Use Policies for filtering and other issues, and their recent report Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media, which clearly states, “Before steps are taken to impose limits on the use of social media and mobile technologies in schools, policymakers and educators need to consider the consequences for learning that such restrictions would produce… Such action should carefully consider the advantages of social media for learning and that these guidelines for responsible use bring media into mentored environments where they can be safely explored and shared.”
3. CREATE A DIALOGUE. Start a conversation with people who manage the filtering system. “A lot of policies have been in place for 10 years or more,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes they assume products are inherently bad, but if they understand that they can be tools for learning, they can see constructive purposes.”
4. GET AN EARLY ADOPTER ON BOARD AND TAKE BABY STEPS. Collaborate with an innovator, and see if you can work on a project that includes a site you want unblocked. Get parent and school authorization to try out the pilot project and document the process along the way in order to share best practices. Try it out for five weeks and see how it goes.
5. USE AND SHARE RESOURCES. Read the American Association of School Librarian’s Essential Resources site and add your own resources to help others spread the message and educate other educators.
6. WADE INTO SOCIAL MEDIA. For those who have yet to start using social media with students, Luhtala suggests “take steps to try to understand what all the fuss is about.” But that will take time and training, as one survey respondent pointed out. “I believe it offers us potential opportunities to further engage our students. However, in order to maximize this potential we must provide teachers and students with additional trainings,” the anonymous respondent wrote in the survey.

When you’re ready to take action, here are the list of myths dispelled directly by the Department of Education’s Technology Director Karen Cator:

• Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
• Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
• Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
• Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
• Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
• Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Erin Scott

As the Bring Your Own Device movement continues to gain momentum, allowing students to use their own devices (mobile phones, laptops, tablets) in school, administrators and educators are figuring out how to iron out concerns and issues that crop up.

One of the biggest issues educators continually bring up is equity.

“Especially at the middle school level, not having a device and needing to find a classmate to share with results in further issues (selfishness, resentment, etc.),” writes Kevin, a commenter to a recent post about Katy School District’s BYOD program. “If so, how are these issues dealt with and turned into instructional situations?”

But proponents of BYOD contend that students who have devices should not be prohibited from using them as a solution to the equity issue. Education blogger Lisa Nielsen gives the following example of a school district in Forsyth County, Georgia.

“Tim Clark, district instructional technology specialist with Forsyth County Schools (GA), explains that in his experience with BYOD, ‘Students who do not have personal technology devices have greater access to school-owned technology tools when students who bring their own devices to school are no longer competing for that access,’” Nielsen writes.

Another set of concerns, according to a CoSN report, are around potential safety and security risks. One prevailing question, for example: Who’s responsible for theft or damage to students’ devices? Different districts deal with the issue in different ways. While some educators say kids take care of their own devices better than those issued to them by schools, Fairfax County School district asks parents to sign a liability waiver along with their BYOD permission slips.

Students’ use of their devices to send harassing or otherwise inappropriate messages is another concern. Most school districts already have bullying and behavioral policies in place, but those may need to be further clarified in regards to students’ devices. While some schools prohibit use of devices in areas that are difficult to monitor, CoSN’s report cites experts who suggest a more flexible policy.

“CoSN Chair Bailey Mitchell, chief technology officer of Forsyth County (GA) Schools—a BYOD leader—advises against BYOD policies that are too rigid or restrictive. The BYOD environment is fluid, he says, and policies should be as well. Some districts give flexibility to schools to craft policies that make sense for their student populations,” the report states.

That’s exactly what’s happening at Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco, where administrators see cell phones as tools used to say or do what might happen in the hallways and dining halls regardless of the device itself. The policy there is evolving, says Principal Gary Cannon.

“The challenge is giving [kids] a sense of a digital footprint,” Cannon says.

Other districts handle it in different ways. According to the report, last year, computers and tablets were allowed at the Fairfax County district, but not cell phones. This year, the district is allowing smartphones to be used, but each school must decide where and how they can be used.

Other logistics that must be dealt with:

• The possibility of passing along viruses or malware from student devices to school computers while the devices are being charged.
• Compliance to filtering policies in schools that ban certain websites on broadband, but that can be accessed through students’ wireless service.
• Unintentional access to private content, both on the part of teachers and students.

The CoSN report lists a host of ideas — everything from wireless authentication to how to deal with virtual and remote desktops — as solutions to addressing some of these concerns.

Erin Scott

By Katrina Schwartz

As more schools start to integrate their own mobile learning strategies and Bring Your Own Device policies, one school district in a suburb of Houston has managed to come up with what appears to be a successful BYOD program.

Katy Independent School District (ISD) has a student population of 63,000 students and 56 schools – elementary, middle and high schools. There are 83 languages spoken by students in the district and 31 percent of the student population is on free or reduced lunch programs.

In 2009, Katy began a three-year plan to change instruction in the school district by promoting a standardized toolbox of web-based tools dubbed “Web 2.0.” They also set out guidelines for behavior in the digital space called “Digital Citizenship,” in the hopes that the school would not just teach kids math and reading, but also how to behave in a public digital world.

But first, the school district needed to understand the ins and outs of mobile learning. Lenny Schad, the Chief Information Officer for the district led the effort who has become the go-to guy for educators looking to implement their own mobile learning strategy has one primary piece of advice: Mobile learning is a holistic educational plan, not just introducing technology into existing structures.

“Mobile learning is all about changing instruction. Because if the instruction doesn’t change, allowing the kids to bring their own device will do nothing,” he explained in a recent EdWeb webinar.

Schad stressed that the teacher’s role in a mobile learning classroom changes significantly. Rather than standing up front or sitting behind a desk and transmitting information, kids are doing a lot of the learning on their own. The teacher’s job is to get up, walk around, monitor the kids’ progress and make sure they’re staying on task.

“It completely changed the dynamic of the classroom,” Schad said. The students became excited to demonstrate what they had learned or how they worked out a problem. And they didn’t seem to mind school work anymore — Schad said kids played educational games for hours without realizing they were learning.

STEP BY STEP

The district rolled out its mobile learning strategy slowly, at first only focusing on the early adopters from the teaching staff, and a limited group of students. The district gave out 130 mobile learning devices to fifth-graders. The devices were web-enabled, but could only access sites approved on the main network. Phone and text functions were turned off. Students loved it. Schad said they were immediately more engaged in the classroom and student achievement scores went up. So, in 2010 the district expanded the program to 11 campuses and handed out 1,700 devices.

Katy put together an approved package of mobile learning tools for teachers, part of the Web 2.0 kits. They use Edmodo, a social networking site for teachers and students to share information about school work. Shad is also excited about Discovery Education, a tool that allows students to bring the world into the classroom. For example, a student could build a virtual circuit on a tablet, and understand the process by actually doing it.

But mobile devices are just one set of tools in the district’s toolbox. Schad says there are times when mobile learning works best, often in math and science, but at other times laptops or pen-and-pencil instruction are more appropriate.

“Part of this education we’ve going through for the past three years is helping our teachers to understand when it’s appropriate to use this and when it’s not,” he said.

After all the groundwork Katy had been laid to test mobile learning with students, teachers, and parents, the BOYD program seemed inevitable — a natural progression. Teachers wanted more devices and that was an easy way to get them. At the end of the three-year implementation, the district surveyed students and found that 77 percent were bringing their own devices to school, 54 percent of which were smartphones. They also surveyed their 4,000 teachers, got 1,609 responses and found that 33 percent of those respondents were already regularly incorporating BYOD into instruction. Another 46 percent said they would use BYOD more if they had more devices.

Schad attributed the hesitancy of half the teachers to concerns over equity – teachers didn’t want to use BYOD if not everyone had a device. Schad said that could be easily solved by having students work in teams – a student without a device collaborates with a student who does have one.

Schad explained that at the beginning of the program, middle school students were only allowed to bring out their devices when directed to by a teacher. They were not allowed to use them at lunch or when passing in the halls. However, the high school students were allowed to have theirs all day. Schad said when establishing these rules restricting use, students behaved more responsibly.

“It changed the tone and helped with the kids understanding of digital citizenship, when it’s appropriate and when it’s not,” he said. There were so few problems with abuse that this school year the district loosened the middle school rules to mirror the high school.

As for funding, Katy received a number of grants that helped the district upgrade its Wi-Fi, which helped kick-start this initiative. Schad estimates that each device costs about $100 and the data plan costs $34. That doesn’t include any of the costs of maintaining the system like training, outreach and the other support roles that made the Katy three-year plan a success.

Getty

Just a few years ago, the idea of using a mobile phone as a legitimate learning tool in school seemed far-fetched, if not downright blasphemous. Kids were either prohibited from bringing their phones to school, or at the very least told to shut it off during school hours.

But these days, it’s not unusual to hear a teacher say, “Class, turn on your cell. It’s time to work.”

Harvard professor Chris Dede has been working in the field of education technology for decades, and is astonished at how quickly mobile devices are penetrating in schools. “I’ve never seen technology moving faster than mobile learning,” said Dede, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

That’s not necessarily surprising, given that a staggering 80 percent of teens have cell phones. This penetration of mobile devices in the consumer market has also wrought what Dede describes as a “sea change” in the education landscape.

“People are talking about this being an inflection point,” said Elliot Soloway. Soloway is a professor at the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and a longtime proponent of mobile learning. “It feels like something major is about to happen. It went from a silly idea, to, ‘Of course it’s inevitable.”

The most recent data available is from 2010, and indicates that 62 percent of schools allow cell phones to be used on school grounds, though not in classrooms. But both Dede and Solloway, who are closely involved in coaching schools on how to use mobile learning techniques, said a lot of progress has been made in just the past couple of years.

“What I’m hearing from schools more is that they’ve eliminated policies restricting using mobile devices for learning and they’re interested in developing mobile learning programs as fast as possible,” Dede said. “We’re going from districts fearing it and blocking it off to welcoming it and making it a major part of their technology plan. We’ll be surprised if a significant portion of districts aren’t using mobile learning inside and outside of schools soon.”

More than 1.5 million iPads have been deployed in schools. That’s not counting school-supplied non-Apple devices, or the most ubiquitous device of all — students’ own mobile phones.

Classroom uses for iPads and cell phones are vast and varied. Some schools are replacing print books for apps that feature videos and interactive quizzes. Kindergarteners are learning to read using an iPad app. Teachers are using tablets to monitor student progress on “dashboards” that show moment-by-moment test scores. Others are using cell phones to take instant polls in class to gauge student comprehension. And more students are using smartphones, many of which have stronger processing power than their schools’ desktop computers, for instant fact-finding, calculating, mapping, and note-taking.

With all these direct applications for learning, it’s easy to justify using mobile devices in school. But what real and lasting effect will they have on the “formal” learning equation? Will this become just another passing craze in the long line of fads that have swung through schools and classes in past years? What criteria are being used to gauge a successful mobile learning program?

For progressives who have been itching to use technology to deconstruct and redesign the current classroom model – one teacher parsing facts to 30 or more students quietly sitting at their desks who will be tested on what they can memorize – the idea of mobile learning holds great promise. Here’s an opportunity to reach every student in a meaningful way. But unless traditional teaching practices morph to adapt and fully take advantage of what mobile devices can afford, some fear the promise will go the way of all the technology collecting dust in the corner of the classroom. Worse, it might eventually lead to what everyone unequivocally dreads: the mechanization of teaching.

“I’m petrified that we’ll apply new technology to old pedagogy,” Soloway said. “Right now, the iPad craze is using the same content on a different device. Schools must change the pedagogy.”

“It’s the classic cycle of old wine in new bottles that tends to happen when people get excited about the technology itself,” said Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which researches how media affects learning. (The new wine bottles being tablets and cell phones, of course.) “They buy all sorts of new technology, things like interactive whiteboards, and slap on old practices on the new devices.”

Even with the latest available technology, schools are still using old delivery tactics –  like technology carts – taking iPads from classroom to classroom in schools that can’t provide a take-home device for every student. But that’s exactly the kind of short-term thinking that drives Soloway mad.

“A cart of iPads will have as much impact on student achievement as a cart of laptops had — which is pretty much zero,” Soloway said. “So lots of schools are going to be disappointed after a year of iPad use when they see no gains.”

Actually some schools are seeing gains. A couple of very early findings show somewhat higher test scores; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reported that students in one class who used its algebra iPad app showed a 20% increase compared to those who used its textbooks; and in Maine, kindergarteners who used an iPad app for literacy scored 2 percent better than those who didn’t. “We’re pleased with such a short window of using iPads as instructional tools,” said Auburn Superintendent Katy Grondin in a Bangor Daily News article. “We are seeing it’s making an impact in learning.”

Flickr:Flickingerbrad

But Soloway and others question whether any of the old pedagogy around algebra or literacy have been affected by the use of the devices in these early studies.

“Publishers will create apps that support their paper textbooks – or they will port their paper textbooks over to a PDF and say, ‘See, we have an eTextbook.’ Publishers can’t admit that their model is broken, that they are in the process of being disrupted,” he said. “All they can do is entrench further and talk even louder that they have the answer; that their apps are really exciting and will engage the kids.”

Soloway challenges schools to think about what they’ve gained in student achievement through the use of devices. “We are using new technology to implement old pedagogy,” he said. “We are not exploiting the affordances of the new technology to give kids new kinds of learn-by-doing activities. Flash card programs for the iPad are too numerous to count. What a waste!”

But what about student engagement, the buzzword that’s dominated edu-speak especially in reference to technology? Soloway said engagement will go up when the iPad is used. “But engagement always goes up when technology is used — laptops, even electronic whiteboards. School is deadly boring to the kids who are accustomed to the fast-paced digital world in which they live the moment the school bell heralds the end of school. So to say that iPads result in increased engagement is to say nothing.”

POSSIBILITIES AND POTENTIAL

So what exactly does this idealized view of mobile devices for learning look like? It’s not easy to specify, or even outline. Each educator, each class, each school will have to find the best way to integrate mobile devices based on its student population. The opportunity of using mobile devices and all of its utilities allows educators to reconsider: What do we want students to know, and how do we help them? And what additional benefit does using a mobile device bring to the equation? This gets to the heart of the mobile learning issue: beyond fact-finding and game-playing – even if it’s educational — how can mobile devices add relevance and value to how kids learn?

There’s not just one explanation. As mobile devices evolve and become ever more powerful and multi-functional, the answers will change. In the meantime, there are some things educators know for certain do make a big impact on learning.

“There’s something in the design of mobile that lends itself to a different way of learning and interacting,” Michael Levine said. “It’s a way of developing a one-to-one personalized computer
in the classroom. There’s a powerful notion that you can walk away with the world at your fingertips.”

In class, the mobile device provides the “one-to-oneness” that Levine said allows for what most educators agree is one of the most important tenets of a well-rounded education: personalized learning – students owning what they learn.

A child, for example, who’s learning about plant growth, can take pictures of the roots of a tree on her way home for school, Soloway said as an example. She brings it into class the next day, shares it with the teacher and other students, and they talk about what they’ve discovered.

But can’t a camera do the same thing — or finding the picture of the root online or in a book? “Taking a picture for themselves is a lot different than getting one from a book,” Soloway answered. “A child owns the picture when the child takes it; it is meaningful to the student. When the child takes a picture with a phone, the child can then integrate the picture into an artifact that also contains a concept map, an animation, etc. In fact, the picture can be imported into a drawing program, then labeled with text. So it is more than a camera.”

Shelley Pasnik, director of Center for Children & Technology agrees. “Having a personal device support your learning changes things up,” she said. “It’s different than having a computer lab down the hall.”

The closest students came to personalizing their learning before mobile devices was changing fonts on Microsoft Word programs. “Now you have your own collection of apps to choose from,” she said.

Flickr:Flickingerbrad

But the apps shouldn’t be the focus of discussion. “That’s where the pedagogical practice comes to play, a thoughtful use of tool sets. Having the apps sitting on your phone on your desk in and of itself isn’t going to make you smarter, and it won’t make the classroom more anything,” she said. “It’s what you do with it, and how it’s supported, how teachers and students know to learn, to use those tools. It’s part of a complex nature of learning.”

And for any this to succeed, the devices – whatever they may be – need to be integrated into a broader sequence of activities, not an isolated tool that sits outside of everything that’s going on, Pasnik said. But that’s exactly what first happens when new devices are introduced.

“That’s a common first step — it’s the ‘extra,’ it’s what kids do when they finish their ‘real’ work,” Pasnick said. “But when it’s really integrated into a sequence of activities, kids are moving between screens given what’s developmentally appropriate, they’re playing games. Some experiences use screens, then manipulatives or other materials, they’re engaged in conversations with peers and adults in the room. That’s where it works. There’s not this ‘privileging’ of this device. Instead, all of it is moving toward the learning goal.”

Using mobile devices as tools toward a learning goal is exactly what students at Catholic High School in New Iberia, Louisiana, are doing. Seniors at the school are using their phones to convert historical information they researched about their hometowns into QR codes that can be used on a walking tour they designed. Smartphone users can learn about historical sites by scanning the QR codes on their devices.

This project exemplifies the kind of learning-by-doing that mobile learning can be used for. Though the device makes it possible to create dynamic, interactive features like QR codes, one could argue that the learning equation of this project is not necessarily creating the QR codes (though there’s also an argument to be made about teaching tech). The point at which kids learn is when they go into their community and research noteworthy historical sites to understand their significance.

Students could have just as easily created individual print brochures that featured historical sites around town — and the educational value would have arguably been comparable. What the mobile phone added was an immediacy to the task at hand. Was it imperative to the learning process? Probably not. But did the QR creation make the project more interesting, more relevant to their lives, and thus more personal for students? That’s what educators are betting on.

But when it comes to using cell phones for things like taking polls, that may not necessarily change traditional lecture-based teaching tactics. “I personally think there are better things to do in the classroom than lecture,” Chris Dede said. “Polling devices are based on lecture. You’re not having a discussion about it, but getting a quick sense of what students understand and modifying lecture accordingly. I would like to see teachers using different pedagogy.”

As a college professor, Dede thinks students can use their cell phones to have “back-channel” discussions that happen during discussions that happen in class. But even then, Dede doesn’t display the Twitter discussions on the board because he says students find it distracting. And if it’s distracting for college students, it would definitely be distracting for grade-schoolers. “Kids are still learning to type, they’re not as good as multi-processing. It’s all they can do to keep track of one thing that’s going on,” Dede said.

These are the kinds of issues that are still being hashed out in schools: What’s more distracting than helpful, what’s just straight up utilitarian, what’s helping students understand concepts better? What’s allowing them to make a particular lesson more personal and relevant?

THE SOCIAL QUOTIENT

The way most classrooms are designed currently discourages social interaction in class. Desks are lined up facing front. But the social aspect of learning that’s been lost in the past decades, Levine said, can be leveraged with mobile devices. “So much of what research has taught us about child development, and even the most recent research on brain development, is that the social aspect — relationships in the context of which you’re motivated to learn, and the types of people who are encouraging kids to learn, that social aspect is fundamental to who we are,” he said.

Mobile devices seem to be — at least in theory — a real enabler of social interaction. “They’re social learning objects,” he said. “Kids plug into their friends and families and important social networks. When you begin to combine features of mobility and socialness and access to every learning object you can imagine, that becomes more seamless and natural and interesting in terms of possibilities.”

This social connection is what helped at-risk kids do better and enjoy math more in a pilot study called Project K-Nect last year. Students collaborated with each other through blogs, instant messaging and email on their mobile phones.

THE MOBILE FUTURE

From where we stand now, it seems that the mobile revolution in schools is inevitable. But as the hype around the wizardry of the technology escalates, it’s imperative to focus the discussion on how to use devices not to mechanize and standardize, but to bring back the human, personal element to teaching and learning. Kids learning from each other, making what they learn personal and relevant, and giving educators more tools to reach students.

“Because mobile devices are the new piece here, people want to know does it make a difference,” Pasnik said. “When we know that learning happens because of relationships, and we want to keep that richness. So the question of the value of a single piece like the mobile phone becomes reductive. You falsely are having to focus in one element, when in fact, learning happens because multiple elements are interacting with one another.”