Justifiable classroom uses for cell phones

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Permalink Reply by Kaviraj Goodoory on October 30, 2009 at 2:19pm

Hi. My students (trainee teachers)use mobile phone to record sound . These files can then be added to a PowerPoint presentation that could help in teaching of languages, for example the proper articulation of words. You will need a software to convert from amr to wav format. We have downloaded one software for that and it works fine.

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Permalink Reply by Gregory Kulowiec on October 31, 2009 at 7:13am

Hi Gail,
My students, and myself, use cell phones in a few ways.
- With www.polleverywhere.com, students use phones as clicker response systems by texting responses to class polls.
- Students call my google voice number on their cell phones to answer questions as an oral assessment.
- Students take pictures w/ cell phones on field trips, email me the pics and they can be uploaded to animoto to turn the field trip into a movie
- Take pictures w/ cell phones for assignments & text the pics to teacher evernote account as an assignment.
- Research: Students create evernote accounts, while researching they take pictures of book pages, documents...pictures are then organized as images in evernote and can be tagged, organized and used later to write research paper.
- Turn cell phones into recording devices to make quick "podcasts." Have students call teacher googlevoice account, and the teacher can then embed the messages in a webpage, blog.

Hope this helps.
Greg

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Permalink Reply by Peter Lane on October 31, 2009 at 7:45pm

To piggyback a bit on Greg's suggestions...
- Students have taken photos of the campus during the fall & spring - then created a compare and contrast movie of the campus as a end-of-year activity.
- Students have used their phone's calculator feature to compute gas prices during a trimester-ending celebration activities.

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Permalink Reply by Olivia Stewart on November 1, 2009 at 10:19pm

I've found that students are going to be using their phones no matter what, so it's best just to embrace it. I like to let students write poetry using "text talk," and sometimes I even encourage them to text their poem to someone else to share their work.
-Olivia

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Luciano on January 4, 2010 at 5:40pm

The way that I have incorporated cell phone in my Spanish class, is to have the students speak with a native Spanish speaker. This helps the students focus and it takes away some of the stress from talking in Spanish with a person. In classroom or taking an assessment students have use their phone to look up words in dictionary web pages. This has worked positively due that I do not have enough dictionaries for the students.

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Permalink Reply by Larry Kearns on November 2, 2009 at 10:01am

You might try 'Polls Everywhere', (www.pollseverywhere.com) You can set up your own classroom survey and have students vote using their cell phones. I don't know a lot about it, but have seen it work at a recent seminar.

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