Cellphones & School: A Great Mix

Why cellphones, not textbooks?

Qualcomm has been looking into just that question, funding field research such as Project K-Nect in rural North Carolina, where remedial math on iPod Touches has helped students increase proficient by 30%. Guest-blogging in O'Reilly's Radar, Marie Bjerede, Qualcomm's vice president of wireless education technology, says the project has turned up four reasons why it helps to teach with cellphones:

1. Multimedia in their hands. Each set of math problems starts with a little animated video showing how to work the problem. "You could theorize that this context prepares the student to understand the subsequent text-based problem better. You could also theorize that watching a Flash animation is more engaging (or just plain fun)," Bjerede writes.
2. Instruction is personalized. So "students need to compare solutions" not answers. "How did you get that" replaces "what did you get?"
3. Collaborative math. "Students are asked to record their solutions on a shared blog and are encouraged to both post and comment. Over time, a learning community has emerged that crosses classrooms and schools and adds the kind of human interaction that an isolated, individual drill (be it textbook or digital) lacks and that a single teacher is unlikely to have the bandwidth to provide to each student."
4. Unanticipated participation: "Students who don't like to raise their hands use the devices to ask questions or participate in collaborative problem solving [with blogging and instant messaging]. There appears to be something democratizing about having a 'back channel' as part of the learning environment."