First of all, what an incredible learning experience this week’s topic “cell phones” has been for me! I have learned so much! I had no idea I could use my phone which has a camera, but no video camera, and an app to create a digital story and share it! I just can’t tell you how excited I was to learn I could do this….and now my wheels are turning as to what this means for educators! Wow! What an incredible time to be in the teaching and learning environment.
Since I work with 33 school districts, I decided to see what cool projects my own teachers were using cell phones to make happen in their classroom. Yes, I knew some of my teachers were cell phone fans in spite of some others who think it’s a shame parents buy them for their kids. Nevertheless, I found one in particular very interesting I decided to make it my choice for the purposes of this lesson.
I conducted my interview with a first grade teacher, Mrs. Brooks. Yes, a first grade teacher. Mrs. Brooks’ story of using cell phones intrigued me because she said she, “Depends a great deal on cell phones to build teacher-student-and parent relationships.” Mrs. Brooks begins each school year, teaching her students about one of the most important words in her classroom, “COMMUNICATION”. She talks to her first graders about all of the different ways people around the world communicate and the tools they use to do it. Mrs. Brooks says, “This usually leads to a rich discussion focused on communication in the home and the importance of it. I want my students and my parents to understand I am committed to forming a partnership with each of them to make their child’s learning experience the best it can be and communication is the way we will do it!” Using www.polleverywhere.com, I post two to three questions each week, send the codes home in my weekly newsletter, and ask parents to sit down with their children, talk about how they would like to respond to the questions, and then text the answers to my poll. If I have asked survey type questions, I’ll often post the results on my blog. A couple of times she has ran into an issue where parents didn’t have text messaging on their phones and in those cases, polleverywhere allows you to also have a website to post your response. Mrs. Brooks says, “Parent seem to really get involved in the process and the kids love it because they brag to all the other kids at school about texting.”
“Since I am at an elementary school, we do not have a policy of any kind regarding cell phone usage it really hasn’t been an issue; however, I do know the middle school and high school in my district have a zero cell phone use policy during school hours.” After learning everything I’ve learned this week that comment made me really sad!
Challenges are always a possibility. And I’m sure there are plenty, but the only one in a scenario like Mrs. Brooks’ described in my interview would be getting all the parents to buy-in and communicate!
And one final note, I am so excited about what I learned this week in this course! Wow, wow, wow!!!
Posted on August 6th, 2010 by Terri Stice
Filed under: Uncategorized
Leave a Reply