Trite though it may sound, mobile technology really could revolutionize teaching and learning—blow open the classroom, restructure it, reinvent it, lift it out of its 19th century educate-the-factory-workers orientation and plant it firmly in a 21st century mode.
Mobile technology has the capacity to engage learners in astounding ways as it links kids to real people, working on real issues, in the real world. It provides them with images and sounds as well as words to make the unfamiliar knowable. It provides connections to peers in places near and far who do important things, thereby sending the encouraging message, "So can you!" Kids can use video, audio, and photos to record and make sense of the world around them, becoming curators in their own space. New technologies enable collaboration among learners in a wide variety of ways, helping them build on one another's strengths.
Mobile tech holds the possibility of making teaching more efficient and manageable. Teachers can monitor student progress almost continuously, using what they learn to quickly modify resources, directions for tasks, and student groupings. Mobile devices and applications make it easier to give students feedback, to issue reminders about homework, and to connect with students' homes. Mobile tech is a genie in the hand that enables teachers to find a needed bit of information or an illustration on the spot. Through these machines and tools, we can more easily create and archive worthwhile anchor activities that provide students with meaningful work when they finish an assignment early and help them use transition time in beneficial, lively ways.
But perhaps the greatest promise of mobile tech lies in its potential for personalizing or differentiating instruction. It provides a range of materials well beyond the scope of almost any library, including access to materials that address the same content at varied reading levels and in many languages. Teachers can record presentations and demonstrations that kids can watch over and over to achieve understanding—rather than feeling hopeless when a segment of learning leaves them blank as it whizzes by in the classroom.
Learners can develop products in a variety of modes, choosing the format that's most compelling to them. They can practice the skills they most need, even if those differ from the skills the majority of their peers need. They can read material at an appropriate challenge level and in a format and language that illuminates important ideas for them. Perhaps most important, they can answer their own questions and become experts in topics that they care about deeply.
Promise in Peril
For each of the promises of mobile tech, of course, there is a barrier—or a score of them. Two of them, our history would suggest, are potential death knells.
First, teachers operate from a set of unconscious and powerful beliefs about teaching and learning that shape most actions and reactions in the classroom. Many, if not most of us, believe at some deep level that teaching is telling, learning is absorbing and giving back, curriculum is largely fact- and skills-based, students are largely untrustworthy, management is about control, and fair is treating everyone alike. To enable mobile tech to achieve its potential, we would need to develop a whole new set of deep-structure beliefs and abandon our current teacher-centric underpinnings. The new beliefs would more accurately represent the science behind education and would serve the learning enterprise and our students far better. However, the change would be comprehensive, and we teachers have a long, consistent history of rejecting and resisting such change.
The second barrier, related closely to the first, is the level of skill—and will—that many education leaders currently have for providing the leadership and support necessary to make this kind of change first acceptable and then attractive to teachers. Clearly, teachers need sustained, meaningful experiences in using the technologies so that these technologies feel comfortable to us. We need support that leads us to feel our mastery of technologies rather than feeling like technologies are our masters.
Such support from education leaders would have to enable us to prove to ourselves that new technologies open paths to a level of practice we hadn't really believed we could achieve. The support would have to guide us in seeing the content we teach not as a series of data items, but as an exploration of great ideas that ask students to use knowledge and skill in service of understanding. And it would have to be personalized or differentiated for teachers. Leaders must offer teachers person-centered learning to model how student-focused instruction might look. Person-centered learning also enables each teacher to progress from his or her own entry point—the only way real learning ever works.
Although there are always leaders who exemplify this kind of vision-based, determined, sustained, and informed leadership, the supply is far smaller than it should be. Educators have never been able to mandate or wish into being substantial change. Limiting ourselves to such approaches will curb the potential of mobile tech to transform the classroom.
In the end, teachers' relationships with technology, kids, content, and instruction—and the capacity and desire of leaders to shape those relationships for maximum power—will write the unfolding story of how we all use mobile tech in the classroom.
