Although since cell phones became fashionable, the trend in schools has been to ban them, they can really be used as educational strategies and obtain great benefits. In this post we want to explain how can students take advantage of their mobile devices?
Education should prepare you for life
Let’s be honest, education serves to teach us to live, to become capable and self-sufficient people. Well, the life that is being lived now is closely linked to technology and that is something that teachers and schools cannot and should not avoid.
It is useless, for example, to prohibit students from taking their mobile phones to school if they will instead spend the rest of the day using them because they know that they only have that time to satisfy their need for technology. Contrary to what the institution seeks, it will be stimulating a greater impulse in them.
The idea is not to support addictive or harmful behaviors for them, on the contrary, the ideal would be to take advantage of these innovative technology resources to integrate them into educational work because, after all, they are part of their day to day life and they will not stop be so no matter how much the schools want to oppose it.
Mobile devices can be useful resources
Beyond their obvious usefulness, which has to do with the possibility of communicating, staying informed and so on, these devices actually have characteristics that make them very useful tools for learning.
An example of this is the possibility of using applications for educational purposes, participating in groups, staying in constant communication and, most importantly, finding anything you want on the internet.
Imagine for a moment that, in the middle of class, a student raises his hand to ask, Who was Christopher Columbus? Logically, his teacher will be able to answer him, but it would be much better to teach him to fish than to give him the fish, right? So we should encourage him to investigate it on his own, for the whole class.
Here we have two possibilities: send him to the library to locate a world history book where they can talk about Christopher Columbus or allow him to use his mobile device and locate this information without leaving his seat. Of course, in any case, you must read it aloud for the whole class, thus guaranteeing the answer to your question and a new learning.
Which of the two strategies seems to be more effective in the times we live in today? Logically the second, since we will also be instilling a habit that students can acquire as a habit: use the valuable resource that they usually carry in their pockets to learn and carry out really useful activities.
Other ways to use this resource in education
There are countless strategies in which the mobile can be included as a resource for education, as many as can be created through the inventiveness of a teacher with the firm intention of supporting their students. Next, we will mention some of them that will surely serve as inspiration.
• Create a whatsapp group where all the students and the teacher meet, to clarify doubts and concerns that may arise outside the classroom.
• Develop an application where students can propose the next topics of science or academic projects, in order to put them to a vote and choose something of their interest.
• Plan online classes for those days when the weather or other circumstances do not allow you to attend schools as usual.
• Invite students to create audiovisual material for their own exhibitions and make the class more enjoyable.
• Allow students to take photos of the experiments carried out in biology, chemistry and physics class, to view them at the end of the course and remember what they have learned.