All students, teachers and administrators should be able to use cell phones and various other computing devices at all times during the day. In this day and age, we need to get over restricting use. Provide constant access to the web and teach more about appropriate use, time management, and critical thinking about the sources that are available. All policies limiting technological use and filtering content should be eliminated, and classroom teachers and schools should have policies on appropriate use. We need to get over a culture of fear and get on with teaching and learning.
Teachers need to stop fearing technology and get involved in the constant flow of information that is making text books obsolete and replacing them with multimedia access to text and information in many formats. Some will object to this because children will have access to pornography – WAKE UP! CHILDREN HAVE ACCESS AND ARE ABLE TO GET AROUND YOUR FILTERS WHENEVER THEY WANT TO! THEY HAVE ACCESS TO PORNOGRAPHY! What they need is teachers who are tech savvy and make the effort to remove communication barriers. They need teachers who are following newsfeeds and understand the world of new literacies and the immediacy of information.
My prescription: All teachers should be on FaceBook, in Twitter, have webpages and blogs somewhere that link to the school, and use the Computing Cloud with their students: all the Google products, all the Microsoft products, virtual words, texting systems, videoconferencing systems (like Skype, Adobe Connect, Wimba and Oovoo), online platforms (like Blackboard, MOODLE, and YouTube), video-on-demand, e-texts (Project Gutenberg, Questia, etc.), and, of course, the archaic communication system, e-mail. Get over your fear and start using daily communication with parents, students, and children. Every classroom should have multiple smart walls with computerized graphic displays that can turn the classroom into the Roman forum of 2000 years ago or of today, the Egyptian Museum, a lecture from Zahi Hawass, the Tomb of Thutmose I, and the demonstrations for freedom as they were happening in Cairo, or Williamsburg in 1775. Teachers should be able to walk their children along a Virtual Great Wall of China or through Amazonian rain forests when they are studying that! There is no excuse for text-only classrooms any more. To my knowledge, children have been doing multimedia composition since 1999, and it motivates their learning to write because the only way to have good multimedia is to have a good plan or story line that is well written, and children learn this quickly.
Issues with television abound, but that does not allow it to be ignored as an educational medium. What are the really good things on TV these days? What are the programs that build knowledge and experience related to schooling and academic study? Think about some of these channels: PBS (various local and cable/satellite stations), National Geographic, Travel, History, Military, CNN, and others with content that should make children and adults think! Even HBO and BBCA have series like the Tudors that present dramatic versions of historical and literary work. Children’s television is certainly richer than before with various channels. However, in every case, the parents should be involved in selecting and discussion what children watch. LOGO, HBO, STARS, SHOW, MTV, even BBCA, and others provide adult entertainment and need careful monitoring and discussion with children, and they MUST watch at home with parents and use discussion guides for learning and inquiry. All channels purvey their biases and target specific audiences. All news programs are subjective and biased despite any claims otherwise. Discussing and identifying the biases presented is a key to developing thinking.
Cell phones in the classroom will become more and more necessary until all desks and tables become smart interactive surfaces. Students can take notes, videos, and pictures with their cell phones. Mine has an app that records voice or transfers it to text. They can send notes and pictures to parents or students who are absent (i.e., sick), or they can talk someone absent through a problem. They can record brief important discussions or examples. There are programs that let them respond to questions you pose and produce graphs of the data in real time as the students text their choices. In an emergency, they have a possible functional communication link. They can document inappropriate behavior for future reference (I know some teachers who already do this). There are probably many other uses that I haven't though about.
I have used laptops with children in schools since 1999. I had children with laptops communicating with a graduate assistant and me when we were in Greece in 2000. Many schools have carts of laptops that teachers can roll into their classrooms so that every child can work on a laptop. I first saw this in 2001, so this sort of technology has been available for at least ten years.
Nostalgia for the book! Get over it! I want access to everything that has ever been printed online. The newer computer monitors have much better resolution and the size of font can be adjusted to meet the reader's needs. They also allow you to turn pages (okay, maybe it's just on the iPad and iPhone so far as I know), highlight, bookmark, stick comments on a page, and flip through. In addition I can search for what I want electronically and instantly. I don't recommend taking books or computer into a pool or a tub unless you're very careful. Concentrating for hours on something can give you a headache, but it isn't the computer that's doing it -- it's your head, and you need to go do something else. Focusing that long on a book will do the same thing. Take an aspirin or an acetaminophen! Do something else for a while. Electronic book readers and simple laptops are just above the $100 mark now. Text books are running $50 -$250 each, even for school textbooks, while the electronic forms are usually free or much cheaper. I think the issue is that the cost of using digital text is much less than hardcopy so many states are adopting e-text for their schools.
Further reading:
Grubaugh, S., Levitt, G., Speaker, R., & Rector, P. (2010). Supporting, Motivating and Engaging all Learner in Online Learning, Literacy and Critical Thinking in Virtual School Content Area Courses. Paper published in the Proceedings of NSSA Conference.
Darby, D., & Speaker, R. (2009, October). Under-prepared African American College Students’ Perceptions of the Impact of Technology in a Developmental Reading Course. (Proceedings/Virtual Paper), Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of e-Learning Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Vancouver, Canada.
Speaker, R., Johnson, M., & Graveline, L. (2009). Toward Understanding Student and Faculty Perceptions of Teaching, Learning and Disaster Resilience in Second Life. In C. Fulford and G. Siemens (Eds.), Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2009: World conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications (pp. 585-590) Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. (CD version; Abstract volume: p. 101 (http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/sessions/index.cfm/fuseaction/PaperDetails?CFID=10556463&CFTOKEN=72042024&presentation_id=38776); On-line Version: http:// (to appear online in 2009). On-line Powerpoint: http://go.editlib.org/ (to appear online in 2009).
Speaker, R., Johnson, M., Scaramella, L., & Robert Cashner (2008). Technology Failures and Successes with Hurricane Katrina: Voices from the University of New Orleans Tell Stories of the Disaster and Rebuilding. In Luca and Weippi (eds), Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2008: World conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications (pp.857- 862) Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. (CD version; On-line Version: http://go.editlib.org/?fuseaction=Reader.ViewFullText&paper_id=28491; On-line Powerpoint: http://go.editlib.org/?fuseaction=Reader.ViewPresentation&paper_id=28491&paperfile_id=4795).
Speaker, R., Johnson, M., Scaramella, L., & Robert Cashner (2008), Technology Failures and Successes with Hurricane Katrina: Voices from the University of New Orleans Tell Stories of the Disaster and Rebuilding. In Luca and Weippi (eds), Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2008: World conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications (p.132) Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. (Abstract, hardcopy: Electronic Abstract: http://www.editlib.org/?fuseaction=Reader.SearchResults&q=Richard+Speaker&publication_type=&search_query=%3CAND%3E(Richard%2CSpeaker)&).
Speaker, R. B., Jr., (2007). Technologies for teaching science and mathematics in the K-12 schools: Review, observations and directions for practice in the southern United States (pp. 123-128). In J. J. Hirschbuhl & J. Kelley (Eds.). Computers in Education (12th Ed..). Dubuque, IA; McGrawHill.
Speaker, R. B., Jr., Laskowitz, R., Thompson, C., Speaker, P., Chauvin, B., Darby, D., & Willis, E. (2005). Collections, critical selections and the teaching repertoire: Examples from autobiographical memoits and multimedia teaching units. In R. E. Griffin, S. B. Chandler, & B. D. Cowden (Eds.). Visual Literacy and development: An African experience.(pp. 187-196). International Visual Literacy Association: Loretto, PA. [refereed proceedings]
Speaker, R. B., Jr. (2003). Technologies for teaching science and mathematics in the K-12 schools: Reviews, observations and directions for practice in the southern United States (pp. 1055-1064). In C. P. Canstantinou, & Z. C. Zacharai (Eds.) Computer Based Learning in Sciences: Conference Proceedings 2003 Volume 1 New Technologies and their Applications in Education. University of Cyprus: Nicosia, Cyprus. [refereed proceedings]
Germain-McCarthy, Y., Haggerty, D., Buxton, C., Speaker, R. B., Jr. (2003). Crafting the technological solutions in high school science and mathematics teaching and learning: Matthew effects and the digital divide (pp. 1041-1048). In C. P. Canstantinou, & Z. C. Zacharai (Eds.) Computer Based Learning in Sciences: Conference Proceedings 2003 Volume 1 New Technologies and their Applications in Education. University of Cyprus: Nicosia, Cyprus. [refereed proceedings]
Kieff, J., & Speaker, R. B., Jr. (2003). Teaching sciences and mathematics concepts in the early grades: K-3 teachers engaging developmentally appropriate practice which incorporated technologies (pp. 1049-1054). In C. P. Canstantinou, & Z. C. Zacharai (Eds.) Computer Based Learning in Sciences: Conference Proceedings 2003 Volume 1 New Technologies and their Applications in Education. University of Cyprus: Nicosia, Cyprus. [refereed proceedings]
Dermody, M., & Speaker, R. B., Jr. (2003). Multimedia Literacy in the Urban Classroom and the Reading Methods Course. Journal of Reading Education , 28(1), 24-31. (Refereed journal).
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