The BYOD Classroom: Smartphones May Change How You Teach

Until Bestbuy offered a free iPhone 5c in December 2013, I had used a 2nd-generation iPod touch for all my “mobile” needs. My trusty iPod helped me reply to emails, read and mark up resources, prepare notes and ideas for teaching, and review my class session plans. The trend only amplified itself with my new smartphone, whose larger screen enabled me to do everything suggested for teaching-with-tablets and iPads with pocket-sized convenience.

Later that December, I became a first-time parent. And again, my new smartphone saved the day. I realized that “raising a child single-handedly” applies in a very mundane way to caring for an infant; everything is done with one hand. I now know that this includes my administration, writing and research. In fact, I prepared to write this post entirely on my smartphone using a combination of browsing on Chrome and speech-to-writing on a Googledoc. (And now I’m reviewing the post with one thumb…!)

Triggers for Change

Students appeared with smartphones in my classrooms long before my pocket-sized revolution. Their use of these devices were the trigger for changing how I teach. Since 2009 I have seen students doing so many things single-handedly with their smartphones. I noticed students capturing schematic illustrations from the chalkboard and slides, looking up information during group work, fact-checking my claims, making calculations and plotting curves from spreadsheets. Their smartphones were a major impetus for my shift from writing lectures to planning class sessions using strategies of active learning and problem-based learning. These devices allowed them to do more advanced work in-class. This pedagogical shift made my classrooms BYOD/BYOT learning contexts. Bring-your-own-device/technology, in my mind, names an approach to teaching that intensively and directly leverages whatever equipment that arrives in my classrooms via student’s pockets.

Smartphones change how I teach because I think they shift the educational playing field away from information and towards the practice and art of teaching.

I knew this from the moment I witnessed how smartphones provide the same level of distributed information-access as textbooks. Both I and my students go beyond Wikipedia by reviewing journal articles, op-eds, blogs, institutional websites and research websites. I no longer cite references in class, I call upon students to locate them and then text-search for the relevant passage. In-class, these devices are data research tools. For homework, they become data collection tools for field-based assignments (e.g. choosing and documenting “religious sites” within specific coordinates, or, conducting interviews).

Collapsing Paradigms

As a media technology, smartphones threaten the temptation of teaching to the textbook. The textbook paradigm collapses in a classroom networked by smartphones if all I do as a teacher is support the textbook’s information delivery (even if I helped produce the textbook!). The students’ instant access to information delegitimizes that narrow mode of expertise. Furthermore, I think that this effect delegitimizes any educator – or vendor – who believes that education is simply about information distribution (and control). This presumption cannot be a starting point for higher education in an era of networked teaching and learning. Smartphones in the classroom only make sense for those who devote their attention to pedagogy.

And smartphones delegitimize tablets. Here’s why:

Did you hear the one about the school that sold all its iPads? After a pilot program comparing iPads and Chromebooks, the middle school opted for the latter. Some of the reasons cited are similar to others’ findings about iPads: they seem better suited for consumption than production and, as a professor at University of Texas at Austin found, they lack a native folder system to keep and organize files of varying formats. I think this will be a trend, despite only a few years after the New Media Consortium’s 2012 Horizon Report put tablet computing into a category of their own – distinct from “mobiles as a descriptor used for typical hand-held devices designed to make calls” – as among the key emerging technologies to watch. I think that tablets fill a non-existent void between smartphones and laptops.

In my experience, many more students have smartphones than laptops. I teach at a small, public institution with a largely first-generation college student body. Perhaps this is why there is even resistance when I make a request that they bring laptops to a class session, since the few who own such devices really do make an effort to safeguard their investments. Furthermore, this is why close to none of my students own tablets.

Which would you choose to do academic work: an iPad for $399 , a comparable tablet for $ 259, or, a 17” screen laptop for $ 349? I was faced with this choice after a home burglary that relieved me of my iPad and laptop. (The smartphones was in my pocket) Like my students, the obvious choice was the laptop that could run any and all programs, allow me to type as quickly as possible and give me a large-screen for multiple windows (e.g. reading while making notes). Therefore, I would argue that educators should spend less time attempting to justify tablets and focus on the winning combination that seems to be emerging from those with their “boots on the ground.”

Tablets are great for media consumption, and I think the most under-utilized aspect of them is as an etextbook platform. Then again, in 2001 people said the same things about PalmPilots: “Books are Perry Como’s generation…. The children don’t see the Palm as a computer, they see the Palm as media. Media is hot. Media is exciting. That’s why they’re going to participate in the reading.”

Tablets do allow students to potentially carry hundreds of textbooks in a lightweight and portable format. Students may also organize information and prepare notes with tablets. Then again, a laptop or smartphone should be able to accomplish these same improved outcomes with a properly-designed etextbook such as Inkling. Even before my tablet was burgled, my smartphone was the first choice to carry if I predicted available downtime to study. And if I thought there would be an opportunity to actually make a dent in my work, I would bring my laptop rather than the tablet.

Engaging Platforms

I think that a sensible pedagogical course of action for technology in the college classroom is to determine the most common types of platforms accompanying students into the classroom, and aim to engage them. For example, my hunch is that fewer students forget their smartphones at home than those who forget their “clickers” (not to mention the extra expense – for students and institutions (purchasing, installations, training, etc.) – of clicker technology). A low-tech solution using smartphones was hatched at the University of San Diego for conducting low-risk student polls and CATs: circulate a color-coded PDF file so that students may simply hold up their mobile devices for voting. As discovered by my colleague in Biology, Edward Awad, the installation of the relatively inexpensive LiteShow III projector interface enables any wifi-enabled device in the classroom to be projected for everyone to see. With these kind of easy and affordable options, smartphones literally make clickers and interactive whiteboards redundant.

And so I think that it is smartphones, and not tablets, that will change how teaching is done in higher education. The BYOD classroom is most feasibly realized on a broad scale with smaller-screened mobile devices.

I think this lesson is being learned from smaller colleges and K-12 institutions. They have the agility to innovate without the difficulties and challenges of scalability within large infrastructures of administration, IT and faculty departments. Larger institutions, like state public universities, should look to them as innovators for affordable and scalable options. For example, Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School has implemented a BYOT policy of encouraging 1:1 education in a device-agnostic environment. Brebeuf provides students and teachers with sensible guidelines for bringing a device into the classroom

Have access to all the resources necessary for teaching and learning.
Develop evaluation literacies (skills) to discern appropriateness of their tools, actions and behavior.
Receive support in the use of technology tools personalized to the learner.

Tablets are not going to be appearing as quickly as smartphones in developing-world contexts, too. Among their many resources on mobile technology and education, each tailored for different global contexts, UNESCO has a guide for mobile learning which not merely explains the educational utility of mobile technology, but more importantly details the policy considerations for gender equality, education for all and equitable connectivity (net neutrality).

To better understand how to use smartphones in teaching, educators should turn towards the roads less-followed, because hype dominates the mainstream education media. Slim and light” and “sweet looks” are not useful criteria for a review of the top 2014 smartphones for BYOD and 1:1.

Doing the Research on BYOD

Insight and innovation is quickly being developed outside of the English language education context. The Quebec college network of ed-tech pedagogical counsellors has already developed an ICT profile for competency-based learning. In Quebec, for example, a joint research project of colleges and universities is producing strong research on mobile technology . There, the research of Thierry Karsenti frankly discusses the difficulties faced when teaching amid the technologies of the BYOD classroom:

The production of scholarly work on a tablet or smartphone is difficult (Hargis et al., 2013). In other words, students need access to “real” computers in order to study properly.
Student distraction (Duncan, Hoekstra and Wilcox, 2012) , particularly with the increased pervasiveness of messaging apps . Not only can smartphones contribute to severe death and injury of college-aged people in certain contexts, they do threaten college students’ grades, too. A recent study found a difference among groups students asked to watch a video lecture and take notes: those taking notes by hand more effectively tested for content retention than those making handwritten notes while accompanied by smartphones. The groups with phones were texts or social network media posts at least once every 60 seconds. The results were similar to a study of students who volunteered to have their in-class laptop use monitored. Students with few distractions from their technology retained slightly less information than those without technology, and students with high distractions from their technology.
Finding and using apps with targeted relevance for scholarly work is no easy task (Khaddage, 2013), and teachers lack time to develop BYOD resources when they are also expected to be up-to-date experts in their disciplinary specialization.
The act of bringing a mobile device into the classroom is so much easier than the work of actually planning how to use it in a pedagogically constructive fashion (Attard and Northcote, 2011), although the movement from conventional books to mobile reading may be a cultural change, only 3% of students indicate that they use their mobile device for study-related reading.
Mobile technology makes classroom management far more complex (Henderson and Yeow, 2012), where the “anytime, anywhere” and “thousands of apps” aspects of the technology makes it difficult for teachers to to keep track of student work compared to paper.

For any technology to change how I teach, it should be worth its salt in the classroom. And this worthiness should apply equally to me and the students. It should be accessible and affordable. It should be easily applicable or disciplinarily applicable. It should be intuitively interoperable with a wide variety of contexts and other technologies. It should be unintrusive to learning. Pens and notebooks fit these descriptors as well as overhead projectors and, when actively engaged in the classroom, smartphones.

Photo Credit: “Cell_Phone_Pocket” by Gwyneth Anne Bronwynne – CC by 2.0

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