Turn that phone on! Embracing Smartphones as a tool for student engagement in the classroom.

Anna Hunter

Abstract below..

This presentation will embrace the themes of enhancing learner experience and engagement and developing students as partners; showcasing a teaching and learning intervention that aimed to address poor student engagement by introducing digital interaction into the classroom as a means of attracting and holding students’ attention and developing their understanding of their processes of knowledge construction.

The presentation will describe the challenge of engaging a cohort of 14 first year undergraduate English Literature students on a compulsory study skills/employability module. Lack of engagement, particularly with independent study tasks and structured classroom activities, had been an issue throughout Semester 1. In response to this, an intervention was designed to target students’ interests and particularly their preoccupation with their mobile phones, by developing a classroom activity that would make the most of their digital literacy. The benefits of using mobile devices to support student learning are well documented (Norris, Hossain and Soloway, 2011); this intervention also sought to capitalise on the popularity of social networking amongst students by introducing Twitter as a platform for managing discussion in the classroom. Students were briefed that they would need to bring smartphones or laptops with them to the next session and ensure that they had an operational Twitter account. The activity itself involved the use of Twitter and Tweetdeck to manage class discussion digitally, thus presenting students with a novel means of interaction that appealed to their digital literacy and presented a range of alternative means of communicating with each other and their tutor; in essence, seeking to create a ‘digital classroom’ (Gordon, 2000). Through this exercise students were also engaged as partners in the construction and analysis of their own text, as the physical evidence of the discussion was apparent for all to see; this enabled the students to begin to renegotiate the boundaries of their own roles as learners. As reported elsewhere (Lampe, Ellison and Steinfeld, 2006), the use of social media also encouraged students to develop and strengthen their offline relationships, resulting in a more cohesive learning community.

The short-term impact of this intervention was significant, however the long-term impact has been questionable and this presentation will therefore conclude by raising the question of how to achieve balance between increasing engagement through ‘fun’ activities and generating a sustained investment in learning from students.

References

Gordon, David T., (ed.). 2000. The Digital Classroom: How Technology is Changing the Way we Teach and Learn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Letter

Lampe, C., Ellison, N., and Steinfeld, C. (2006). A Face(book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. Social browsing. CSCW ’06, November 4-8, Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Norris, C., Hossain, A., and Soloway, E. (2011). Using Smartphones as essential tools for learning: A call to place schools on the right side of the 21^st Century. Educational Technology 51, pp.18-25.