Educational Leadership - February 2011

Students need to learn mobile etiquette and safety. Fifty-two percent of 10–17-year-olds who use cell phones say they send text messages while watching a movie in the theater;

28 percent send messages at the dinner table (Dias, 2007). Additionally, students often do not understand the repercussions of sending potentially embarrassing text messages (which are often not private and can be retrieved by cell phone companies); using inappropriate chat language; or publishing mobile media on the Internet without permission. Cell phone instructional activities give educators the opportunity to talk with their students about mobile etiquette.

Mobile phones can empower students who are visually or hearing impaired. For example, by coupling the phone with websites like Dial2Do (www.Dial2Do .com), students who are visually impaired can send speech-to-text e-mails, blog posts, tweets, reminders, posts on a Google calendar, and so on. In addition, these students can listen to podcasts, web pages, e-mails, or Google calendar posts. With Dial2Do, students who are hearing impaired can take advantage of text-messaging features to participate in activities that normally require oral communication—they can use sites like Google Voice (http:// google.com/voice) to view text transcripts of voice-mail messages.

phone calls online as audio files or podcasts. Teachers can also create a Google Voice account ( http://google.com/ voice) that provides a free local phone number—associated with the teacher’s phone or a voice mailbox—on which students can leave recorded homework assignments or test answers.

For example, a Spanish instructor
uses her Google Voice account to give
oral quizzes. Through Google Voice, she
sends a text message to her 23 Spanish
2 students telling them when their oral
quiz is ready. The students call in to the
sites couple with basic cell phones to
allow geotagging. For example, Flagr
( http://flagr.com) allows users to create
public, semiprivate, or private maps.
Anyone who has a Flagr account and is
a member of a particular map’s group
can send a photo or text message to a
specific point on that map.

A basic cell phone can
be the Swiss army knife
of digital learning tools.

Learning Activities with Cell Phones Teachers are leading students in exciting learning activities with cell phones. All the following activities can be done with a basic cell phone that has a camera and text-messaging capabilities (no need for a smartphone).

teacher’s Google Voice number, listen to a greeting she has created giving them their quiz instructions, and then speak their answers. When each student hangs up, his or her quiz becomes an MP3 file in the teacher’s private Google space. The Spanish teacher then receives an e-mail or text message that she has a new voice-mail message. She can call in to Google Voice or log in online to hear the quizzes. In addition, the teacher can send a text message to each student directly from Google Voice with the student’s individual evaluation.

Because Google Voice archives voice-mail and text-message communication, there is a running record of all activities and progress. If the teacher chooses, she could make the oral quizzes into podcasts by uploading them to a podcasting service, such as i Tunes, and requiring students to subscribe to the podcast.

Activity 1: Podcasting, Oral Recordings, or Oral Quizzes Probably the easiest activity to do with a cell phone is to create instant podcasts and oral recordings. Many resources on the Internet allow students to post their

Activity 2: Mobile Geotagging
Mobile geotagging is the ability to
post media (photos, video, audio, or
text) from a mobile phone to a specific
point on a map. Although geotagging
usually requires a global positioning
system (GPS) or Bluetooth, some web-
munity and then send each picture and
a description of the habitat where they
found the species to the class Flagr
map. Back in the classroom, the teacher
opens the Flagr map, and the students
begin to identify the species and discuss
why they were found in each particular
habitat.

Activity 3: Digital Storybooks Although there are many ways to create digital storybooks (such as Photostory, iMovie, Jumpcut, and Voice Thread),