Posted by Toni

My cell phone contract is up, and shopping around for a new phone and data plan has me reconsidering smartphones as a learning tool rather than contraband.  The potential for learning with smartphones is so much greater than for laptops or even tablets, if only because they're like kids-relatively small and resilient.  Also, even very young students already know how to use them, often with greater facility than adults. The folks at Pew Research even point to smartphones as the technology that is most rapidly closing the "digital divide."

So what if we liberated cell phones from prohibited status and instead of taking notes, your young person takes a picture of the teacher's white board and focusses more on the class discussion?  or the teacher texts or e-mails a picture of the white board to an absent student?  How about reinforcing classroom learning at home, not with worksheet homework, but by taking pictures of triangles found in your neighborhood? 

I'm not living on another planet-I know there are plenty of reasons not to hand over an expensive piece of equipment to a child, even if it didn't have Internet access.  (I am a member of the Buy Three Inexpensive Winter Jackets at a Time Club-so we always have the one we're wearing, the one to wear to school when that one goes missing, and the back up one that is dry and relatively clean).  But, think of the power of that learning everywhere, all the time, tool.  Nothing gets me more excited than seeing an adult and child holding a smartphone between them as they ask a question, and find the answer together.

What do you think?