Please use your PDAs and iPhones in the classroom

October 12, 2:26 PMWorkplace Training and Development ExaminerLenn Millbower

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Places please for effective learning.

This article shares a news report about why students should use PDAs and iPhones in the classroom.

“… And please turn off your cell phones, pagers and PDAs.” Many training programs begin this way. Many school districts, likewise, have a cell phone confiscation policy in place.

And yet our learners, adults and the young, are more interested in Twitter, IMs, and Facebook than they are us. The instructional response to technology has been to try and control it more effectively. As any trainer who has witnessed itchy fingers with no IMs to type or has been interrupted by a ringing cell phone can attest, tight control doesn’t always work.

It is possible that we are trying to control the uncontrollable: change. W. Edwards Deming once commented, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

 Maybe it is we, not our learners, who are the learning disrupters. Why work so hard to pull learners out of their comfort zones? Learning is already uncomfortable for many folks. Why make it more so?

On Sunday, October 11, 2009, the Associated Press carried an article, Some Tampa Bay high schools allow cell phones to be used in class, written by Jeffrey S. Solochek of the St. Petersburg Times. In it he reports on one high school’s response to the technology challenge. Ray Bonti, principal at the Wiregrass Ranch High School in Pasco County, Florida, has given teachers permission to harness the cell phone as a positive classroom influence.

The article reports the results by showcasing teacher Jennifer Gould’s class. She introduced the subject of D.H. Lawrence and asked her students to surf the Internet for information on Lawrence. The results were engaged students drawn into the subject matter.

Another teacher, Ariana Leonard, was quoted as saying, “They all have them (cell phones, iPhones, etc.) anyway, and they’re dying to use them in class.”

Instead of making the students sit there wishing they were IMing, Pasco County has put those itchy fingers to work in the pursuit of learning. Perhaps we all should.