Cell phone trial in school

Pinelands High School

Nicole Masureik

Twitter: nimming

Image CC licenced for reuse by JonJon2kB from Flickr

Why cell phones?

• Insufficient access to computer labs

• Most kids have one

• Can provide 1-on-1 programmes

• Cheaper than ipads

• Wanted to know whether they could be used efficiently as a learning tool

Safety and school policy??

• Phones handed in at reception before school• Special tags – all in one box• Box collected/ returned by teacher• Parental permission forms• AUPs• Video release forms• Blog is closed to public• Twitter names designed to be non-identifiable

• Outside of these lessons, normal sanctions apply if caught with a phone

How did we choose the classes?

• Two Gd 11 classes (one maths, one LS)

• Large overlap between pupils in classes

• Top academics in the school

What are we doing?

• Twitter backchannel for questions, h/w, activities (different hash tags for each class)

• Blogging summaries/ solutions/ discussions

• Voice recordings

• Video recordings

• Photo-documenting the lesson

• Evernote for note-taking

What have we noticed?

• Increased energy in lesson

• Greater participation in lesson

• Greater collaboration in lesson

• More questions being asked

• Questions are broader/ wider/ deeper

• Lesson format shifting from mainly content delivery to teaching critical thinking skills

• “Flipped” classroom experience

High points?

• Interactive lesson from home using Twitter & blogs by sick teacher

• Creating video summaries of lesson BY pupils FOR pupils

• Having a backchannel for questions!

• Pupils have access to teacher after school hours to ask questions (don’t have to wait till next lesson)

Techniques we’ve implemented

• 2nd projector and laptop for Tweetboard

• Twitter host in every lesson

• Summariser for every lesson

• Twitter apps to analyse tweets e.g. Archivist

Results so far?

• Stats are always misleading…

– Small sample size

– Short time period of trial

However, LS class appears to have a 4% higher result with phones.

Is that statistically significant? Yes.