Erin Scott

A.P. Chemistry students use their cell phones to answer their teacher's question.

When we talk about using cell phones in class, we’re not just talking about using cell phones in class.

The idea of mobile learning touches on just about every subject that any technology addresses: social media, digital citizenship, content-knowledge versus skill-building, Internet filtering and safety laws, teaching techniques, bring-your-own-device policies, school budgets.

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.

In the most ideal class settings, mobile devices disappear into the background, like markers and whiteboards, pencil and paper – not because they’re not being used, but because they’re simply tools, a means to an end. The “end” can be any number of things: to gauge student understanding of a concept, to capture notes and ideas to be used and studied later, to calculate, to communicate, to express ideas.

WHEN IT WORKS

In Ramsey Musallam’s A.P. Chemistry class at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco, cell phones are a natural extension of the way he communicates with his students.

As soon as kids walk in, Musallam sends out a text blast through Remind101, asking them a challenge question that’s related to the day’s lesson. “First person to tell me the units on K for a second order reaction gets chocolate,” he types and sends off. His students know he does this regularly, so they’re constantly anticipating the question during the day, in and out of class.

“Sure, that’s kind of cute,” he says, admitting that it can be seen as gimmicky. “But more importantly, in my mind that’s saying, ‘You’re carrying around something that I can contact you with.’ It’s a fun ways to stay motivated in our day, which can be pretty dry sometimes. It’s a chance to think about what we’re learning outside the context of state testing.”

Once the class settles in and things are rolling along, the steady hum gets louder when kids are excited or working together, then quieter again when they’re working out problems on their individual little whiteboards (to be clear, these are not digital).

Musallam constantly walks around, sending out directives – “Write the answer on your table!” ““I want you guys to come up with an answer now, and text it in,” “What’s the ridonculous choice out of all these answers here?”

Students work in groups, and when they have a question, they call him over. He arrives with iPad in hand and records his voice and his writing on the iPad, which he immediately uploads to the class website so other students can benefit from the explanations instantaneously. (This, by the way, is another form of flipped teaching, he says.)

“This way, if I need to explain a common question, everyone can access it,” he says. “I don’t have to repeat myself going from group to group.” But rather than stop what everybody else is doing so he can explain a concept, students can watch the video he just created if they need to. “I’ll just tell them to look at the online tutorials to find out about common questions,” he says.

Erin Scott

Ramsey Musallam considers the online poll reflecting his students' answers.

During class, he asks students to take a multiple-choice quiz and send in their answers through a poll on their cell phones. The students’ votes are immediately displayed on the projector that’s hooked up to Musallam’s laptop.

This is key, Musallam says, because seeing the answers that get the most votes makes a big impression on his students. “If they all held up note cards that said their answers — A,B,C or D — the visual of the ‘distractors’ [the wrong answers] wouldn’t be as  powerful,” he says. “And this makes the experience more immediate. I want it to be as rich and as visual as possible. I want them to see things, not just know it.”

Musallam can list a litany of reasons why and how mobile devices spice things up in class. “The data integration wouldn’t be as rich, the experience wouldn’t be as dynamic, the cognitive load is higher,” he says.  But even though all but one of his students have cell phones and use them for polling and instantaneous quizzing, it’s clear that they would be just as rapt in the classroom activities without them; they’re not necessarily fixated on the fact that they’re using cell phones or that they’re seeing instantaneous results of their polls. Their eyes and ears are on him.

What makes Musallam’s class an interesting case study is that his teaching practice is based on a specific technique: he incorporates peer-instruction and inquiry-based learning, mirroring Harvard professor Eric Mazur. The videos and polls just help support that.

“I’m using it in the context of peer instruction, which is research based. You get anonymous feedback, which is great, and kids see all that information condensed,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just cute and fun and that wears off. But much more often, it’s more efficient and meaningful, and it makes the classroom feel like a bigger place.”

Seventh-grade history teacher James Sanders, who teaches at Kipp San Francisco Bay Academy, makes the analogy of the cell phone as a tool being used in a modern-day shop class: It makes things a lot easier.

Erin Scott

As Mussallam writes on the iPad, it's being shown on the projector.

Though every student in his history class has a Google Chromebook, only 60 percent have what he calls “smarter” phones, and many have iPod Touches. So he has students work in groups of three or four.

Using Socrative, an app that shows real-time poll results for both multiple-choice and short-answer quizzes, he challenges his students at the end of class to answer specific questions in order to get a broad look at whether they understood the concepts discussed that day.

But with subjective topics like world history, and a challenge like “Write one or two sentences why the Aztec Empire fell,” how can students convey a deep, meaningful understanding in just a couple of sentences?

“Writing concise paragraphs explaining complex concepts is incredibly powerful,” Sanders says, adding that the class also works on research papers and projects around historical characters in addition to these short polls.

The tool also allows students to read each others’ responses, which allows for a “deeper level of analysis,” he says. “I can ask them to write their answers on paper, submit it, review it myself, and then choose one or two to highlight in class, but the idea of having these tools is that it augments our skills as teachers. To be able to ask a question of 30 students and get response instantaneously just speeds up the learning process, rather than waiting for individual students to respond.”

IS IT WORTHWHILE?

But for every teacher who’s able to seamlessly integrate cell phones and other mobile devices, there’s another who doesn’t see the transformation as easily. Paul Barnwell, who now teaches English and digital media at Fern Creek Traditional High School in Louisville, Kentucky, decided to stop using cell phones in class after giving it a go with an eighth-grade class.

Barnwell bucked the school’s policy and used Poll Everywhere for both multiple-choice and open-ended exit poll questions. About three-quarters of the students had cell phones at the time.

“The kids were pumped up to use their taboo devices,” he says. “After a few trials, they quickly understood how to submit their answers, and the engagement factor was high since their responses popped up onto the projected screen.”

But he was uneasy with excluding those who didn’t have a phone or the ability to text. And, he said, some of the “class clowns” took advantage of the anonymity of the polling to text inappropriate statements.

“I decided it wasn’t worth the time or the hassle,” he says.

Barnwell doesn’t like the idea of letting students Tweet information to a common address and hasn’t found an application that “promotes efficient ‘best practice’ yet. “But I’m also not seeking it out,” he says, adding that because he’s got 10 desktop computers in his current class, students can use them for research projects and looking up facts online.

Barnwell hasn’t given up completely on cell phones, though. “If I can plan a lesson to ensure that high-level thinking is encouraged and greater participation, I might try phones again,” he says. “As far as polling and other simple uses, I see little benefit at this point. I can’t stand how most teenagers thoughtlessly and even belligerently use Twitter.”

TEACHING DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP

It’s not uncommon for kids to use cell phones for inappropriate behavior at school. But some believe that when students misuse the devices at school, teachers must step in.

“It’s our responsibility as educators to teach kids how to interact with the world,” Sanders says. “Those interpersonal human conversations are incredibly valuable.”

Erin Scott

Cell phones are just another tool, like pen and paper.

At Sacred Heart, where Ramsey Musallam teaches, the school’s cell phone policy is shifting, as they try to sort out their social policies.

“Right now, kids can’t use cell phones unless a teacher instructs them, but that’s evolving,” says principal Gary Cannon. But if kids are using them to take pictures, they’re not reprimanded by faculty.

The staff fully recognizes that the cell phone is just a tool. Twitter and texting are just tools used to say or do what might happen in the hallways and dining halls regardless.

“The challenge is giving them a sense of a digital footprint,” Cannon says.

For Musallam, that’s all part of how he sees his job as an educator.

“I’m here to serve my students,” he says. “If we can leverage cell phones in a way that’s meaningful, I’m going to do it.”

Lenny Gonzales

By Doug Ward

If you want to see a teacher fume, just bring up the topic of cell phones in class.

Technology, especially social media and text messaging, competes for students’ attention as never before. When half of social media users say they check messages from bed, and 11 percent of those 25 or younger are willing to interrupt sex for a Twitter or Facebook message, what chance do teachers have of keeping students’ attention in class?

Then again, teachers often have their own problems paying attention.

We chide students for texting in class but then encourage them to tweet. We force students to put away their phones when we lead class discussions but then immerse ourselves in our own screens when colleagues speak. At meetings of all sorts, we have accepted a new posture: heads down, fingers tapping out words, eyes awaiting responses. Faculty members have adopted many of the same habits they condemn in their students.

It seems, then, that everyone, teachers and students alike, need to find new ground rules on how to engage when real and online life collide.

WHAT ARE WE GAINING AND LOSING?

At the recent Journalism Interactive conference, for instance, an array of speakers grappled with the role of technology in the classroom, with the use of tech in the news media, its influence on teaching and learning, and its opportunities and frustrations.

Audience members — mostly professors — sat heads down, eyes trained on smartphones, tablets and laptops. At the front of the room, panel members tweeted, checked messages from the audience, and followed the conference Twitter stream. It was hard to tell whether anyone was paying attention.

None of this was surprising. Promos for the conference encouraged participants to bring their gadgets. And this was, after all, a gathering of journalists, who crave constant information. With my own iPad and keyboard, I took copious notes and occasionally checked the live blog, the electronic schedule and, uh-hum, my email.

I began to wonder whether in our haste to share and record we haven’t lost something. When we live tweet, are we truly paying attention? Has technology focused us so much on the 140-character sound bite that we miss the bigger message or even the dinner table conversation? Are we becoming so hooked on the thrill of speed and immediacy that we are losing our sense of context?

More broadly, have we lost the ability to be present, to listen and pay attention — really pay attention — to make connections and ponder ramifications?

VALUE OF ENGAGEMENT OF ALL KINDS

I have no intention of condemning technology. Tweeting and live blogging during events can create a broader conversation, and can allow audience members to participate more easily and to ask questions and make observations that might otherwise fade away. They can be excellent tools for teaching and learning. They also create a potentially valuable archive.

And yet, the rules of etiquette have grown murky, in the classroom, the auditorium and nearly everywhere else that people gather. A recent conversation with a colleague about how students engaged with a guest speaker in a class drove that point home for me. The colleague had asked students to live tweet the event, something that made one student seem especially uncomfortable. As classmates and even the speaker tweeted, that lone student sat and watched, looking disturbed, even pained.

To a degree, I understood. The student was being asked to do the very thing most professors had warned about not doing in other classes. As professors, we expect our students to pay attention to classroom conversations rather than monitor their phones or pass personal notes via text message. Some professors have asked students to check in their cell phones before class. Some don’t even allow laptop computers because students have trouble resisting the siren song of Facebook.

Students themselves have expressed concern about the boundaries and ramifications of technology. At my own university, the Student Senate recently polled faculty members about classroom technology use and asked about the usefulness of policy recommendations that professors could add to syllabuses. The announcement for the poll said students were confused by a wide variety of policies and practices across campus.

REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES

We want our students to be engaged because engagement fosters learning. And yet the rules of engagement are changing — in education, in business, in life. We once knew and accepted the unwritten standards of etiquette: When a speaker spoke, we paid attention. We may have taken notes, but we listened respectfully, eyes forward. Being present and attentive was simple courtesy.

Now, though, we’re redrawing boundaries without discussing why the original ones existed in the first place — or understanding what impact the new boundaries may have. Our tolerance and our culture are changing one tweet at a time.

It’s something we need to pay attention to.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and the Budig Professor of Writing at the University of Kansas. He is the author of “A New Brand of Business: Charles Coolidge Parlin, Curtis Publishing Company, and the Origins of Market Research” and a former editor at The New York Times.

This story was originally published by PBS MediaShift, covering the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook

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Over the last few months, there has been increased interest in using text-messaging at school. Although many schools do still have strict policies that forbid using cell phones in class, more are exploring ways to use text-messaging as a communication tool to bridge home and school.

There’s also been an explosion in new tech start-ups that offer services for just this purpose. They’re taking advantage of students’ and families’ access to cell phones, but more importantly perhaps, they’re tapping into the popularity of text-messaging among teens. They’re also working to make sure that the SMS communication is safe, that both student and teacher privacy is protected, and that records are kept so that any inappropriate behavior can be identified. Some of these startups include Remind 101, Cel.ly, and Snapp School. (You can read more about Cel.ly here.)

Interesting, at some of the most recent Startup Weekend EDUs — an event that brings together educators, engineers, and entrepreneurs to launch education startups over the course of a weekend — winning teams have built text-messaging apps: ClassParrot was the winner of the recent Mega Startup Weekend in Mountain View, and Text2Teach won first prize at Seattle’s Startup Weekend.

It’s an indication that text-messaging is becoming recognized as a powerful tool that schools should find a way to use. It’s one that can keep students engaged in class (though that idea remains fairly controversial, as cell phones are still viewed by many as a distraction). And it’s one that can help bridge the communication gulf between home and school.

But just as text-messaging may be on the cusp of widespread adoption in schools, there are rumblings in other sectors that text-messaging is dead. Or more accurately, perhaps, that text-messaging should simply die.

Part of the call for the end of text-messaging is that it is an incredibly expensive service, one that the phone carriers profit greatly from. Although text-messaging involves sending data, the charges for SMS are separated from a cell phone user’s regular data plan. Earlier this year, the technology blog Gizmodo did the math on how much users pay for a text versus how much they pay for the same amount of data — assuming, that is, that the typical text is roughly 160 bytes. According to its calculations, you pay $.20 per text for a “text.” But when you send that same amount of data as, well, “data,” you pay $.000002. Ouch.

The cost of a text-message might seem inconsequential, but when you consider the number of text-messages that the average teen sends per day, it adds up quickly. And if you consider the number of text messages that a school might send to hundreds of students, or a teacher might send to multiple classes of 30 or so students — during a typical week or over the course of the school year — the cost of text-messaging starts to look like it might outweigh any argument about the benefits of better communication.

While there could be solutions here on the carriers’ end — discounted messaging for schools, for example — some people are placing their bets on apps versus SMS. Take last week’s release of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 5, that included iMessage. This is a new messaging service that allows anyone using iOS 5 — whether on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, to send — to communicate with others who use the devices. You can send text messages, photos, videos. It also includes a group-messaging feature. These messages are all free (or rather, they’re included as part of users’ data plans, which as indicated above, comes at a cheaper per byte rate than SMS).

The problem here, of course, is that this only works on Apple mobile devices. It’s a good solution for those with the high-end smart-phones, but a lousy solution in terms of equity — or for those who prefer to use non-Apple devices.

Of course, free messaging comes with other smartphone apps too. Google Voice, for example, allows you to send text-messages without paying texting fees, and there are a number of generic “messaging apps.”

But the beauty of SMS is that it works on any phone, whether it’s an Android or an iPhone or a very basic flip phone. Text messaging is also the tool that many students already use. They’re more apt to read and respond to texts — they’re comfortable communicating that way. That makes texting an important tool for reaching them and reaching families. But as schools begin to embrace SMS, it’s still worth pointing out that it’s an expensive way to communicate — and one the tech world is hedging will go away.

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Despite their ubiquity among students, mobile phones are still viewed as contraband in most classrooms. Students are told to turn their phones off, leave them in their lockers, or leave them at home. This response to what is arguably the most ubiquitous 1-to-1 computing device available in our schools today undoubtedly led many students to list bans on mobile phones as one of the biggest obstacles to technology use in the recent Speak Up 2010 report.

That same report also indicated that parents and students were paying for these devices themselves — and were more than willing to purchase data plans if mobile phones would be accepted in the classroom. This willingness on the part of parents to subsidize technology in the classroom could free up valuable school funds for purposes other than buying hardware. If for no other reason, this may be cause to think twice about blanket bans on mobile phones in the classroom.

Meanwhile, a number of projects underway are moving forward in exploring how these devices can be used for educational purposes in countries outside the U.S. where there are far fewer computers per household.

The World Bank‘s ICT and education specialist Michael Trucano recently highlighted a number of interesting pilot projects in Pakistan that are demonstrating how those with even very low-end mobile phones can leverage these devices to open up new learning opportunities.

Trucano describes a project at Asghar Mall College in Rawalapindi where students receive a daily vocabulary quiz via SMS (mobile phone text). The multiple choice quiz is addressed to each student individually. The students reply to the quiz via SMS, then receive an automated response based on their answer. This response notes whether or not the student was correct, and uses the correct answer in a sample sentence.

“This sort of thing is no substitute for school, of course,” writes Trucano. “But, given current test messaging rates in Pakistan — a country with some of the fastest growth in recent years in text messaging in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as some of the lowest tarif rates — it is quite cheap. It is ‘on-the-go.’ It is supplemental to what is being taught in the classroom, and increasingly easy to do, given the technology tools and code base out there. While Pakistan may not see high household penetration rates of desktop computers connected to the Internet for many, many years to come, most every household already has access to a small connected ‘computer’ of a different sort — the mobile phone — and this project is seeking to capitalize on this reality.”

Trucano also notes that some of these students may have been educated in very large, lecture-based classrooms up until now, and the feedback via SMS may be their first experience with this sort of “personalized” response.

In that vein, some questions to consider:

• What’s the impact of messages related to classwork when they’re part of a large stream of messages students receive from friends, family, horoscope advice, sports scores and so on?
• What sort of learning happens best (or is reinforced best, perhaps) via SMS?
• How can these sorts of messages be adapted to students’ progress and how can they be sequenced and scaffolded over time?
• How many students are able and willing to participate in these sorts of educational activities via their mobile phone? Can students afford the texting fees? Do they want to use their text-messaging allocations for this purpose?
• Can we subsidize this sort of SMS traffic for student populations?
• If these sorts of messages between home and school become more common, will there be a way to include parents and parents’ phones in the loop?
• Can these quizzes be sent to parents’ phones so that they can have the opportunity to pose a question to their children? “This would, in a very small, modest way, alert parents to what students are supposed to be learning,” suggests Trucano. “If students don’t know the answer, this may trigger parents to push their kids more, and/or to question whether the school is doing a good job in this area (including whether or not the official curriculum is being followed at all!).”

Although the World Bank blog post focuses primarily on the pilot project in Pakistan, there are a number of other text-messaging apps and programs out there, including StudyBoost and Remind101, that let teachers send quizzes and assignments “home” via SMS and that let students run through flashcards and study guides.

SMS educational apps may seem incredibly simple, but they may well be aimed at just the communication medium that students are most likely to use — text-messaging on their mobile phones. How can schools and parents take better advantage of students’ phone usage and ownership — even if it isn’t something that necessarily happens in the classroom?