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Mobile phone in class
1-Collect every day language.
Ask students to:
use this feature to take notes on the English they
read or
hear outside of school and either present
the notes to the class or send them to you as a
text message.
2-Take pictures of English text
This can be achieved by using the Camera
feature on their mobile phones.
3: To organize language samples.
An extension to Ideas 1 and 2 is to use a free program to upload notes and pictures
4: To record language from media
outlets.
Most
phones include a memo recording feature
that can collect language
samples from TV or
radio. The students’ collected samples give you
an opportunity to analyze the language, discuss
where they were collected, and provide feedback.
5: To record conversations
outside the classroom.
Students can record interviews or conversations
they engage in outside the classroom.
6: To reinforce vocabulary learning.
you could text the words covered in class to
encourage students to review them outside the
school context.
7: To make flashcards for mobile
phones.
You or your students can create vocabulary
flashcards that can be retrieved, shared, and
practiced anywhere.
8: For circular writing.
One
activity is circular writing, where students
create a story together by
contributing one text
message at a time. Each student writes a sentence
or two and then sends this on to the next student,
who adds another
message, and so on until the
story is complete.
9: For tandem learning.
Interactive
writing can be encouraged through
tandem learning. In this activity
two students who
wish to learn each other’s native language pair up
and exchange text messages.
10- To keep a blog.
Students use the Text Messaging and Camera
features to add messages and post pictures to
their personal blogs.
11: For micro blogging on Twitter.
Micro
blogging involves sending short messages
(limit of 140 characters,
including punctuation and
spaces) from a computer or a mobile phone.
12: For social networking.
Like
Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are
enormously popular social networking
tools that
allow groups of “friends” to meet, post and chat to.
13: For a language exchange.
Using
phones for speaking may not seem like an
original idea, but one way to
encourage reluctant
students to start speaking is to establish a
language exchange.
14: For “phlogging”.
To
encourage students to practice individual
speaking, they could start
phlogging, a recent form
of blogging that entails calling a number and leaving
a message on a website,
15: To distribute listening material.
Many
phones have memory for graphics, photos,
and music that you can use to
download listening
material for your students, who can in turn transfer
them to their phones or other media.
16: To distribute reading material.
Similar
to the listening idea above, you could
download reading materials for your students.
There are numerous sites with free reading
material,
including Project Gutenberg which also
has many audio-books available.
17: To play games.
Many of the free games for mobile phones, such as
Scrabble and crossword puzzles, involve a focus on
language.
18: To keep a portfolio.
Most
learning inevitably takes place outside the
classroom. Students need to
process new
information and assimilate it into their inter-
language, which is their current
stage of second
language development as reflected
by their control
of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.
19:To check student comprehension
and get feedback.
Mobile phones can also help you in your teaching.
One way is to add an element
of interactivity to
your classes through audience participation.
20: For research and data collection.
Mobile
phones are now becoming indispensable for
research and data collection. Being small and light
, they are excellent portable tools
for researchers to
collect socioeconomic, health, and other critical
information from communities worldwide.
'Connecting over
Skype makes learning an
adventure! It brings the curriculum to life by
experiencing real-time the people, places and
things we are studying.
This dramatically changes my students’
engagement. Best of all, my
students learn
empathy for others, becoming compassionate
global citizens. '
- They're a huge distraction. ...
- Cell phones can be a channel for bullying. ...
- Digital addictions and mental health concerns. ...
- Cheating in exams and learning the wrong way.
