Looking back...and looking forward

One thing that is becoming clear in the year I've had to consider and reconsider online teaching and learning is that we are too often slow to see the benefits of a changing techno-landscape. Worried that laptops "interfere" with learning (or not paying enough attention to the sage on the stage), teachers insist that they be turned off during classtime. So worried about the trouble students might get into by surfing the web, we used to limit computers in labs to "real" work only--word-processing. Looking back, how short-sighted and silly that seems!

I think the same thing will be said in the not-too-distant future about the use/abuse of cell phones in class. Rather than seeing them as evil devices that interupt or pull students from the assignment at hand, could we not embrace them as learning devices?

Here's a cool tool to help with that. Poll Everywhere makes everyone's cellphone a clicker device. I've been mightily entertained by the use of clicker technology in conferences, but haven't thought seriously about using them in the classroom because of prohibitive costs. They are a bit of coolness that has some application for my work, but not so much as to warrant the funding fight, figuring out how to store them, dragging them back and forth to the classroom, etc. But, what if I could use the idea without the hassle of the hardware? That's what this website does. It turns everyone's cellphone into a clicker device, with the results immediately posted on a website that we can all watch.

I bet there are other ways to think of phones--more so as students glom onto smartphones that will allow them to surf and perform other applications during class. Is it a distraction? Sure, it could be. But so can a pencil and a piece of paper (remember doodling during boring lectures?). Focusing on engaging students--and their tools--rather than limiting their use of technology presents an opportunity for online and in-class instruction.