All schools I have taught in and every lecturer I know has either confiscated a student’s mo­bile phone (including myself) or told them that using the phones in class is completely against school policy. This, however, does not stop students from trying, if not always succeeding in covertly using their phones, and most frustratingly, texting underneath their desks.

Let’s take some time to think about this. Mobile phones are banned from classrooms due to their inert nature to distract students with a one-way ticket to dreamland and I-just-shut-down-in-my-own-planet land. This leaves the teacher talking alone and, god-forbid, missing a sentence of what we teachers have to say about our subject. This also depends on the age group of the class.

The saying ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ cannot be truer in this scenario. Beating them was never the issue, just part of the overall idea that anything social and the classroom simply do not mix (which hopefully is changing).

How about making texting and mobiles an educational tool? Research has shown that although texting is a major cause of concern for written language skills in younger students, it has also shown that the rate of participation of students on text-based integration is extremely high.

I am sure that in your class you have those students who never contribute, who are just shy to do so, who simply feel they cannot express themselves or just stay in the shadows of the more extrovert, overpowering characters. Texting helps those students feel safe and helps them articulate and ‘forces’ these learners to write their thoughts in a more concise and clear way.

When I refer to texting I am not talking about SMS (the standard short message service provided by mobile network providers) but text messaging in the form of a social gathering (network). Why can’t your class be a social gathering? Although we all know there is a very fine line between being a teacher and a friend, especially with online networks such as Facebook, open communication between the student and the teacher is a must to start shifting ideologies.

I do not want to promote any particular service provider, but I have personal experience of a service called Celly, which is aimed at the education market and is available as a free download for mobile devices. Celly is a free service that creates closed social gatherings based on texting.

A very easy way to understand the concept is to imagine a mini-Twitter for you, your class and your student’s parents but one that works both by internet-attached devices and a standard SMS fallback for non-connected devices just to make sure that the tool is completely inclusive. But this is not a discussion about the product but the methodology.

The saying ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ cannot be truer in this scenario. How about making texting and mobiles an educational tool?

Again, shifting paradigms, we cannot keep our classrooms in some sort of suspended bubble and think the outside will not come in. So use the outside world to your advantage, and most importantly, for that of your students.

Although services such as Celly are a great educational tool, its use in a non-standardised way leaves a lot of leeway for trouble since there will be a discrepancy between schools and teachers.

This brings me to pointing a bit of an accusatory finger at the Government. With state schools holding most of the student population, the Government is in a premier position to start implementing electronic communities for inclusive and open communication teaching; however, at the moment, there are no such tools.

While Maltese e-government was at the cutting edge in the world (emphasis on was) e-learning, or to be more accurate, electronic educational support systems, are in the dark ages (in technology terms).

To be fair, this stems from a lot of factors – teacher unions, teachers’ resistance to change and educational paradigm change trepidation – just to name a few, so pointing the finger at the Government is a bit unjust in this matter.

Having said that, we cannot continue to expect a richer relationship between student and school, for them to feel that school is a viable tool for their future, while all we’re doing is constantly enforcing the notion that what you’re living outside and what you’re living inside are two completely different worlds.

From note taking, attendance reports, work and progress reporting, we must start bringing into our schools electronic systems that have been in use in the business world literally for decades now.

I am in no way suggesting that tools like the one mentioned replace the methods used hitherto, but if we want to improve our educational system, more importantly the quality of education our learners are getting, adapting the classroom to the outside world is a must, open communication with the learner is a must, creating a community between parents, teachers and students is a must, all we have to do is make use of the tools that are already available to us in a structured and positive way.

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