Lecture do bad to child in classroom?!11? Bad, scantron, bad!! Why is it that, whenever digital pedagogy comes up, it’s always counterposed to the worst possible forms of teaching? It’s such a straw man argument.
I’ve seen students use cell phones as learning tools a few times, but more often than not they just take students out of class discussion and collaborative learning.
Of course you can build entire curricula using digital learning methods, but the drawback is that you have to sacrifice significant class time walking students through how to use everything and responding to technical difficulties. Way more students than you’d think are pretty alienated from most online media and few come into the classroom as independent and focused the puppets in the video. A more realistic version of this video would have included at least one puppet who spends twenty minutes trying to figure out how to use a wiki before giving up and chatting with friends about something off topic. I do sometimes utilize digital tools in my classes, but I always first ask myself if the payoff justifies using them when socratic dialogue or groupwork could accomplish the same goal, often in a way that is quicker, involves less hassle, and provides results that are much easier to observe and evaluate. These considerations don’t come up, though, when we’re busy focusing on the tools themselves and what wonderful \ terrible things they might do.
There are also plain old boring IT considerations: people are…mysteriously…resourceful when it comes to making recreational technology work and it’s not really your problem whether or not everyone has equal access to tech toys; but if you formally bring it into the class you have to be fairly sure that there are enough working units for everyone and not too many snags and glitches that allow people to just sit there whining about how ‘It’s not working! It’s broken!’ without trying anything.
Hardly an insurmountable problem; but if you just go with the “Lol, BYOD will fix it!” approach it will not end well for you. At all. Even slightly.
Seriously man, I remember the problems with just having two different models of graphing calculator in math class in the mid-late 2000s.
Most people had the TI-83, I and a couple of dunces had the TI-84+. Supposedly they were “identical”, but the secondary and tertiary glyph markings for the buttons were slightly different fonts between the two models. Therefore the class would end up paralyzed by intentional stupidity. Nobody but me wanted to learn math, so they’d blew up molehills into mountains. Fucking dumbasses. It’s not like they can get a cheaper, more complete education anywhere else.
Until the math teacher involved dropped the hammer and got the situation fixed, our math textbook actually used pictures of TI-83 keys(slightly simplified vector art, not photos, that’d just be weird) as part of the instruction on how to do things.
Rather than an English explanation of what you were trying to accomplish, or the relevant mathematical symbols, you’d just get a bunch of pictograms telling you what buttons to push if you had exactly that model of calculator. All the charm of the text-slurry-by-committee you’d expect from a textbook; but with an apparent attempt to target the same reading level as those aircraft safety guides designed to be equally unhelpful to people illiterate in any major world language.
The door-monitor said, ‘Why did you go out without my say-so?’ and he beat me.
The water-monitor said, ‘Why did you help yourself to water without my say-so?’ and he beat me.
The Sumerian monitor said, ‘You spoke in Akkadian!’ and he beat me.
My teacher said, ‘Your handwriting is not at all good!’ and he beat me.
-Scribal student’s writings from approximately 1750-1792 BCE
One time in high school - after reading a bit of a book on how to improve your willpower - I decided to see if I could just left my arms go limp for 15 minutes, do absolutely nothing with them at all. Feel free to try it, it’s a bizarre experience. My nose got itchy, but I stuck with it. Having gone through the fifteen minutes, I thought about the classroom and what I was supposed to be paying attention to, and decided I might as well do another 15 minutes.
I agree but only because the code in the phones is networked and operated by third parties fiduciarily bound to objectives other than educating students in the classroom according to the teacher’s plan.
If the code in the phones was networked and operated by teachers and students according to their educational plan, then it’s a different situation.
I don’t know if @popobawa4u was making an analogous point by mentioning digital convergence devices. And @Deleuzer made a similar point by emphasizing that tools like phones are generally featured in both good and bad teaching.
But if the students and teachers don’t control the code in the phones, then the risk of distraction is high.
Distraction is a non-negotiable commercial goal of the third parties controlling the phones.
You’ve reminded me of one of my children’s teachers, who decided to put my daughter in a cluster of desks with the two boys who had been openly bullying her in class. They started showing her porn on their phones…in class. So she called me during the school day and told me my child was accessing porn, and it had to be at home because she didn’t have a cell phone. Had to go to school and explain to the principal that the only “access” my kid had was due to those bullies who not only were not under control in that classroom but were actively being supported by the teacher.
Sounds like your classroom is a little out of control too.
(Guess I haven’t gotten over my bitterness yet. It took two years of good teachers to get over her anxiety at school.)
Wait, so he calls the question “How do cell phones distract students” a “blunt, caveman” question because he assumes the question is entirely one-sided, and then says that he has a nuanced response?
Why doesn’t he assume the askers may be trying to get information on how cell phones can distract students, vs how they may be otherwise good for students?
Or is he really saying that there is no way that cell phones can ever distract students, and so the act of asking the question showcases the asker’s own ignorance? (Because that’s stupid.)
Also: Feel free to have a utopic view of what 0.1% of students may be doing with their cell phones, but as someone who has worked in classrooms, let me tell you: it’s pretty much entirely Snapchat, Yik Yak and other instant-messaging social apps.
Yeah - when I used to teach a laptop class, it was always the worst when the Wi-Fi went down or when one student’s computer imploded. You can always revise an offline activity on the fly to make it work, but when something computer-related glitched there was just nothing you could do.
There’s also the fact that digital pedagogy puts all kinds of new burdens and expectations on instructors that often have little to do with the course being taught. I can teach someone how to write an essay or interpret a poem because that’s what I’ve been trained in, but I have no idea how to teach someone to produce an effective YouTube video. I can walk someone through it and give a few pointers, but I’m not going to be able to give them the same level of guidance as a class dedicated to video production. Because teaching with these tools often brings instructors to the edge of their competences, digital activities tend to turn into low stakes, arts and crafts days. Students may have fun with it, but it’s not always clear that they are learning as much as they could be.
It’s probably not your fault that you do it this way, since I bet that in addition to being a teacher, you’re an employee at an institution which mandates certain teaching techniques.
So don’t misunderstand me as blaming you when I say that your teaching style is why your students are watching movies and texting gossip.
Totally. The institution is wasting both your time and the students time by forcing you all into an outdated and overly hierarchical educational model.
I’m often surprised by how few things students do with their technology. If the accounts they’re giving of themselves are accurate, they go to a small handful of major websites and spend the rest of the time on social media and chat programs with friends. There are always some students who are way more tech savvy than that, but I find the whole “digital native” idea overblown. If only they were 3D printing artifacts from the industrial revolution…
Pff, yeah, if only we used the right teaching methods, suddenly school would be more interesting than sex and kittens on the Internet. If cell phones are more attention grabbing than the latest blockbuster movie or the user’s significant other, something tells me that this is going to be a problem regardless of the teaching.
This attitude reflects the founding principle of most educational systems: that children do not want to learn, and so discipline must be imposed from above to force them to do what they don’t want to.
But that principle doesn’t reflect reality. It doesn’t explain, for example, why many children left to their own devices choose to study the mechanics of minecraft redstone in order to build rudimentary circuitry rather than watching cat videos.
Put another way, you’re exaggerating the allure of cell phone/internet content. In fact, most of the modern world is just quite boring and alienating. So we’ll take even the mediocre stimulation of “Up Next” on youtube as an alternative.
But experimenting, building, exploring, imagining, and exerting power over your surroundings are very compelling human desires, especially among young people. The main task for education is to connect youth with this potential by any means necessary.
You’re talking about teaching in really abstract terms. There are going to be students in your classroom who will go out and build minecraft circuitry for funsies, and then there are going to be students who are easily distracted and easily bored. If half of your students are self-starting, super-clever, naturally inquisitive types who will do wonderful things with their phones and half your students just want to look at cat videos, you have to craft your class policies so that you don’t spend the entire class pleading with the students who want to look at cat videos.
And let’s be honest - a lot of learning just does not fulfill spontaneous human desires. That doesn’t mean that students all need top-down, hierarchical control all the time, but it does mean that students might have to put away their phones for the two hours they spend with me.
