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• Smartphone Solutionseffective Curriculum Ideas 4th Grade
• Smartphone Solutionseffective Curriculum Ideas Preschool
• Smartphone Solutionseffective Curriculum Ideas Examples

Scholastic Classroom Ideas to Go! Search by subject and grade through more than 1,200 lesson ideas from Instructor magazine. Save your favorites in your personal library. Socrative Socrative is a clicker-response system similar to those used with interactive whiteboards. Case ideas strike, and to sign and date pages. Concept generation Concept generation is the process of generating new ideas. It is supposed to be synthetic rather than analytical. The purpose is not to judge the feasibility of solutions but instead to keep coming.

Wonder Workshop’s comprehensive curricular resources enable teachers to help students practice computational thinking and 21st-century skills with Dash, Dot, and Cue robots. Great ideas Neil and i’ve shared them with the student-teachers i work with. One of my favourite activities with sound, which I suspect would follow the activities you describe, is thinking about wave properties of sound: diffraction through doors, reflection (echos) but in particular I like using a pair of speakers from an oscillator on a set frequency, then getting pupils to move around. What phonemic awareness activities for kindergarten are the most appropriate to use? Try this big list of playful and hands-on activities to develop phonological awareness in kindergarten. Ideas included for working on phoneme isolation, blending, segmenting, and phoneme manipulation.

If you ask educators about cellphones in their classrooms, they will all have a passionate response and a story (good or bad) about their presence.

Most will express frustration at their problematic nature: they’re a distraction; they make noise; they can be used for cyber-bullying or cheating. That said, I think that more and more educators are recognizing that cellphones, and especially smartphones, can be a useful learning tool. But how do teachers make that happen?

As an early adopter of smartphone technology, I immediately recognized the incredible computing power they possess. Many students now have pocket technology that’s much more powerful and innovative than the equipment used in early manned space flights.

Still, like my colleagues, I imagined cellphones as a huge classroom management struggle.

So I set out to test a theory, with this basic premise: If teachers actually direct how students will use their cellphones in class as learning tools, we can minimize their role as a distractive presence.

I am the first to acknowledge that my teaching situation is not the same as many other educators. I teach in a small, independent school. My students generally come from a financially stable background and I teach fairly small classes (15-22). All of my students have some type of smartphone device. I understand this is not the case for all teachers. But most classrooms will include some students who have internet-capable devices, and many of the activities I will discuss here can be done in groups with just one device per group.

Supporting lessons & activities

A good rule of thumb for any classroom use of cellphones: the lesson/activity must be engaging as well as productive. You don’t want technology for the sake of technology (and students aren’t going to be intrinsically fascinated with a device they use routinely when they’re outside of school). If the students don’t enjoy what they’re doing, they will be more tempted to use their phones inappropriately.

In Class Polling/Quizzing – One of my favorite tools to use in class is a program called Poll Everywhere. I wrote about this service in an article at my personal blog: “Poll Everywhere – A Free/Cheap Alternative to Polling Hardware.”

This is a great piece of software to use in the classroom (and it’s free for audiences up to 40). You can create quiz questions for which students text in their answers. No expensive clicker systems to buy, set up, and maintain! If students register their cellphone numbers (a requirement in my class) you can even track their answers for impromptu quizzes or review!

In-class Backchanneling: Backchanneling refers to the use of networks & social media to maintain an online, real-time conversation alongside spoken remarks.

For example, if you attend a keynote presentation at a conference these days, you’ll often find that some listeners in the audience are using their mobile devices to comment to other audience members about things the speaker is saying, while the speaker is saying them.

Backchanneling can be a great way to give quiet students a voice, to introduce additional facts and insights during a lesson, or simply to encourage “conversation” during lecture or group readings when you don’t want to actually interrupt the presentation.

While Twitter is probably the most popular medium for backchanneling news and entertainment events (using #hashtags to create an instant network), teachers will probably want a more controllable platform than Twitter provides.
Educators can readily set up a private backchannel using free webtools. One popular program is Today’s Meet, which allows individuals to create temporary rooms to host backchannel discussions.

Poll Everywhere can also be used for this purpose. Plus, it allows you to moderate comments and prohibits any anonymous contributions.

In-class Readings & Handouts: Smartphones can also be used productively in the classroom as eReaders for books and handouts. I place all student handouts into DropBox folders (see my previous Voices article: “DropBox – a Superb Classroom Tool“). If we are reading or doing work in class, they can access our Dropbox space via the internet and open reference material without printing it up or asking for a new copy. It’s literally right in the palm of their hand.

Of course, for traditional reading materials (textbooks and paperbacks), you can use mobile apps like Kindle eReader, Nook App, iBooks, or Google’s Play Books (just to name a few). Many of them host free content and some allow you to load content of your own. This is a great way to save money on book purchases and photocopies. Using these apps, students can even highlight and annotate.

Doing research

One of the greatest active uses I have found for smartphones is in the area of research. I remember the days when I made photocopies, took meticulous notes, and tried to employ a series of notecards in a vain attempt at some semblance of a coherent organized system. Smartphones do a much better job. In this case, the power is in the apps!

My favorite research tools on the smartphone are “camera scanners” (which capture information using the phone’s built-in camera). One of the best apps I have found is a program called Genius Scan+ — available for iOS, Android, and Windows based phones. This app allows you to take pictures of documents (even books with those bendy pages), crop them, and then enhance them for ready viewing. You can create notebooks of documents (if you are copying sections of a book or article) and then store them on the device or export them (as a photo image or PDF) to Google Docs, DropBox, Evernote, and more. It’s a great tool for you or your students to organize research materials.

Smartphone Solutionseffective Curriculum Ideas 4th Grade

Evernote is another great application that students can use to organize their notes and images, take voice notes, write notes by hand, gather web clippings, sort emails, and more. You can put them into pre-categorized folders (class, project, theme, etc) as well as give them “tags” which makes them easy to search and sort later.

Google Search on the Go!

Most people can grasp the power of having Google in their pocket, but few recognize that the mobile version of Google is much more than a web browser. The Google Search App can be used not only for traditional searches, but has a voice search feature as well. You talk — it searches.

My favorite feature of the Google Search is its ability to perform searches using images! This feature, called Google Goggles, is a creative way to search the internet for image based content (watch the video). I employed it last year in a creative field trip experiment at the local museum.

These mobile Google capabilities offer a great way for students to explore material on the fly, using a variety of media. Any content, images, etc. that they find can be sent to a Google Drive account.

Stepping out with smartphones

I hope these ideas will be enough to stir the interest of fellow educators and encourage you to begin experiments of your own. And if you’re already using smartphones in your classroom and you’re doing something you don’t see here, please share in the comments!

When we combine the modern smartphone with wireless internet access and the remarkable number of cheap and free mobile apps now available, we find that they are truly amazing pocket-sized learning devices. Whether educators like them or hate them, the reality is that cellphones are going to become pervasive in our classrooms, if they aren’t already.

We can choose to be proactive — to employ and direct the use of these powerful tools — or we can continue to exert our energy in combating them.

If we are truly preparing our students for the future, then I believe it is our obligation to incorporate these ever-present devices into our daily teaching practice.

Image of smartphone: BigStock

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My three year-old daughter has rarely seen an old-school phone without a screen. Nevertheless, she still places any vaguely telephone-shaped object, such as a shoe, to her ear with a passionate, “HELLO”. Somehow, I find this more comforting than her blankly staring into the sole of the shoe numbly thudding away at pretend buttons in imitation of the way she’s mostly seen a phone used.

If she was using her shoe as a smartphone, I might start to feel the first prickles of discomfort. Not a discomfort born from nostalgia for retro telecommunications devices, but from unease at my daughter’s early acquisition of our facile smartphone obsession. Virtually no modern setting is too sacred to escape the mobile telephone’s remorseless cacophony. Including schools. This is an issue because most adults have skills that help them balance their phone habits with the nuances of socialising and the need to prioritise their time. However, in young people – particularly in secondary and tertiary settings – we are seeing concerning trends related to phone use.

One study that followed the impact of schools banning mobile phones found that mobile phones can have a negative impact on learning through distraction and that their removal from the classroom can yield an improvement in student performance, especially for the most vulnerable. In a tertiary setting, Kuznekoff and Titsworth found that students who did not use smartphones while participating in a lecture wrote 62 per cent more information in their notes and were able to recall more information than their phone-using counterparts. A subsequent study by the same authors found similar results. This time, students who did not use their mobile phones, or used them for class-related content, earned higher grades and scored higher on information recall than students who used their phone for unrelated purposes.

Interviews with 628 high school students on their perceptions of mobile phones in the classroom revealed that, not only were the vast majority of them already using their phones at school, but also their views as a group were largely discrepant. Most students (70 per cent) could identify benefits associated with mobile phones in the classroom, such as increased engagement, motivation for learning, creativity and productivity. However, almost a third of the cohort reported concerns regarding disruption and misuse of mobile phones – particularly under exam conditions – and harmful activities such as cyber bullying and sexting. As for teacher attitudes towards mobile phone use, the research has been mixed, with some researchers demonstrating positive support for mobile phones in the classroom and others suggesting they should be left at home).

Anecdotal reports also reveal successful phone integration in the classroom. Today’s smartphones are microcomputers with the capacity to provide many of the advantages that technology can afford in terms of accessing a broad, deep and meaningful education. A plethora of phone apps have been encouraged by schools, particularly those that support wellbeing by building on relaxation skills and offering help seeking resources. Smartphones have endless possibilities as educational tools, which is why some schools tolerate them. Others ban them, or at least, attempt to do so.

Then there is the small matter of social skills. While smartphones do offer opportunities to connect with others and facilitate a sense of belonging and community, there is a time and place. I recently overheard a small child ask her mother why Daddy had an angry face. A subtle glance over at the next table revealed that “Daddy” was on his smartphone. There was no angry face, but rather a serious, engrossed-reading-face summoned from the undecorated monotropic concentration needed to focus on reading small font in a noisy cafe. These scenarios make me question whether smartphone use is helping or hindering the social development of children (not to mention the social abilities of the smartphone users themselves).

So what is the solution for schools and parents?

Smartphone Solutionseffective Curriculum Ideas Preschool

Ultimately, good sense must prevail as we harness the strengths of the technology and practice everything in moderation. Smartphone use will remain an ongoing issue for parents and schools, particularly in terms of content and what is considered suitable, and also how it should be managed. There will always be misuse as we have seen recently with students bring mobile phones into examination settings. Schools should be at the forefront of ensuring their mobile phone use policies and practice match current telecommunication technologies.

With problematic phone use now considered a risk behaviour alongside alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use, schools should ensure they are addressing the psychological, social and health issues associated with technology (e.g. a lack of sleep from late night phone use, cyber bullying, sexting) . By building some of the health-related implications of technology into the curriculum, we may be able to mitigate potential harm and promote the safe, controlled and productive use of mobile phones.

Smartphone Solutionseffective Curriculum Ideas Examples

Both schools and parents have a role to play in boundary setting, providing guidance with appropriate and inappropriate phone use, and teaching self-regulation and self-control skills. Parents can and should serve as appropriate role models for telephone use. That’s not to say that parents should only use their smartphones in private but they should try to employ the same phone etiquette they are trying to teach their children.

Ultimately, school is a microcosm of wider society. Just as using a smartphone may be unacceptable during a job interview, neither is it in the middle of a classroom. Knowing that certain behaviour is acceptable in some places, but not in others is at the crux of how young people can better use mobile phones responsibly and fruitfully at school.