The mobile or cell phone is much like a sword or knife; the latter can be used to cut bread into slices or an orange into two halves to be eaten or made into juice, or rather can be used to knife someone in the ribs in a fatal argument. Cellular phones, on the whole, can either be extremely detrimental or highly beneficial.
As a matter of fact, mobiles can jeopardise people’s lives, not least youths’ life. A teenager, gaping and gawping, whose eyes are glued to the screen of his smart phone 24/7 deserves at once our sympathy and empathy. He is astonishingly beleaguered by tweets, ongoing chat from various social networks and magnetising images from Pinterest, Flickr or Instagram. He or she may burn the midnight oil at the expense of health, serenity and study; the disturbing device is placed under the cushion and viewed whenever a beep is heard, be it an SMS or a call. It is actually an accompanying nuisance and is used in cheating, to boot. Every year a host of phones are confiscated as their owners were busy cheating. Technology then is improperly used to trigger off inequity amongst candidates and guarantee a chair in society for the incompetent. On top of other worse things phones are used to take pictures of girls, in indecent situations, who are later threatened to yield large sums of money, or the pictures will travel through all social networks to be seen by millions of visitors. As can be seen above, this is mainly the wrong use of the knife, so what about its proper fruitful use?
Let’s first dart a glance at the teaching learning environment to view few misuses of phones and a battery of right rich uses. These tiny devices may be utilised by trouble-makers to disrupt classroom management by setting them on the general mode, in lieu of the plane mode, and issuing tones and songs every so often. The teacher may be photographed or filmed without him or her being aware and launched onto YouTube. Shall we now inspect the rose-coloured side of phones especially smart ones?
In a learner-centred environment where the teacher is not the sole purveyor of knowledge, such smart gadgets may make learning fun and high-yielding. Here are some tips that can make teaching and learning enjoyable:
- The teacher can use the stopwatch or the timer to time different activities and habituate students to the tone terminating the activity; the timer can be adjusted by teachers and students alike.
- Students are allowed to look up difficult words in the while-writing phase on an online dictionary or an already installed mini-dictionary.
- Learners get familiar with dictionary skills using their phones, differentiating between word class, word function, pronunciation and definition.
- The old-fashioned tape-recorder is superseded by phones in a listening session using audio or video.
- Students are allowed at the end of the session to take a snapshot of the lesson on the blackboard when they run out of time as long as they would copy it later on their copybooks.
- Students may be given the opportunity to take notes on the memo and write down their homework.
- As almost everything is googlable nowadays, students may google a difficult word on Google image to know what it means on the spot.
- In a math session for instance, students may be given the right to use smart calculators to solve a problem.
At length, using phones in classroom settings is still a bone of contention; it’s highly debatable and much resented by a multitude of people. Nevertheless, phones can be used for merely educational purposes providing students prove mature and responsible and unless they are distracted by games.
