Year 8 and Their Phones – A Friday Afternoon Class

Posted on April 20, 2008
Filed under Lesson Plans & Ideas, Mobile Learning & Technologies, Mobile Phones and tagged cellphones, quiz

I usually dread having Year 8 for Period 5 on Friday, but not this time and maybe never again. On Thursday morning at the end of their class that day, I told them to bring their mobile phones to class next time. I’m not sure they thought I was serious. At that precise moment I didn’t really have a clue as to what I was going to do with them, but knowing they were bringing them along would make me plan something, rather than saying “Ah yes, I will get around to doing that!”

So, sometime on Friday morning I was sitting at my desk wondering exactly what we were going to do with these phones. I sent a quick message out to my Twitter network:

and got these replies:

This is how the class went:

Video and Audio Recording: Not everyone had phones, so the kids worked in groups of three or four. That seemed to be ok. The first activity was to make a short video or audio recording introducing themselves in Chinese – just ‘Hello, I’m … and I’m … years old.’ This went quite well and one student even sent his file to the SMART Board computer by bluetooth. Hopefully I can get more of that happening – a great way for kids to hand in work!

I went around to each group and listened to or watched the little videos they made. Some of them made quite an effort and tried to get it right a couple of times, which is not something these particular boys tend to do!

Changing the display language: After that, I got them to check out how they could change the language of their phone. I was tempted to get them to change it to Chinese, but thought it might take a bit too much time to get it back to English if they got too confused, so I just wanted to see that they knew how to change the language.

Text message races: Our next activity was text races, as @kolson29 had suggested. I asked the class for three sentences that related to a video they had watched the class before and wrote them up on the whiteboard. Then the races started. I called out a sentence number, and whoever it was who had the phone in the group for that round had to write the sentence out in a text message – accurate punctuation and spelling expected. Whoever was finished first had to stand up. Well, there was yelling and jumping out of seats. These kids are quick! The sentences were in English this time, but next time I might have to get them to write in pinyin – romanisation of the sounds of Chinese characters.

Another idea I just had for text races, or even just a text message activity – give the students a sentence and get them to write it in SMS language – the more creative the better!

Quiz: The final activity was a quiz. Each phone was used like a quiz buzzer. I held up a flashcard and asked a question about it. Whoever hit their ‘buzzer’ first got to answer the question. There were some interesting sounds going on around the room, and the kids had some fun testing out different ones for a few minutes before. Here is a short sound clip of what that was like. The phones aren’t all that loud (I recorded this with the class digital camera which is also why it sounds NOTHING like me), but you can pick them out:

[display_podcast]

Overall, I would say this lesson was a great success! The kids were keen, and they participated in all the activities enthusiastically. They even listened when I spoke, which is a great leap forward for some of this lot! The biggest problem was the kids who didn’t have phones. One of the groups was too big and there were a couple of students who pretty much missed out entirely. I made sure that everyone had a go at something during the class, but we really needed a few more phones to make sure that everyone was as involved as they could be. I thought kids playing with phones and not listening when I needed them to might be a problem, but it really wasn’t. They were keen to listen and move on to the next activity. Especially seeing as I said that if they didn’t listen, then we wouldn’t be doing this again.

So, I am definitely going to get them to bring their phones again. Maybe a few more will remember theirs next time! We’ll discover all sorts of other things we can use them for and I’ll get the kids to think of some activities. Here are some ideas I’ve got at the moment:

Using the video and audio functions to assess students spoken language
Get students to peer assess each others videos.
Students can record or video themselves at home and then email me the files, or bluetooth it to the SMART board when they come in to class.
Use of writing text messages to practice sentence structure and to familiarise themselves with different words.

I have not given the students my mobile phone number, nor do I intend to. I won’t ask them to text me or anyone else so they will not have to spend any money. Their phones are fabulous little tools though and stay tuned to see how else we use them…

They’ve Got ‘em, Let’s use ‘em

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No Responses to “Year 8 and Their Phones – A Friday Afternoon Class”

GingerTPLC on April 20th, 2008 12:57 pm

Love that you told them to bring the phones without knowing what you were going to do with them! Way to take a chance and way to challenge yourself! And WAY to go with the Twitter network help! Love that you’re teaching them through the use of the tool!

I so want to do this type of thing with my students’ cell phones, but I have kids aged 10 – 14 and many don’t have phones yet. I suppose that I’d also need to be sure they have unlimited texting plans. Wonder what the rates are to text overseas…

It’s plain to hear that they are fully engaged in the class. I wonder if you could now put it on them to think of other great ideas for those phones in your class?

I agree about the changing the phone’s language to Chinese, but hey, they’d have an authentic and immediate need to learn Chinese!
Andrew J on April 20th, 2008 8:23 pm

Jess,
Great to hear it worked! Don’t you love it when lessons like that work. Had a brain wave (ouch!) whilst reading – interested to see if you think it would work.
*If all students had phones, you could put them in teams to translate sentences.
*Each member of the team is given a word or phrase or clause from the sentence to translate into text on their phones.
*The team then needs to get into the correct order so that the word order of their sentence is correct (and ineffect they have a correct translation of the sentence)
Could be chaos, but engaged chaos …
Jess on April 20th, 2008 9:17 pm

Andrew – I think that could work really really well! Not all of my kids have phones, but we could manage it by having rounds or something like that. I say good idea – I might try it out very soon!

Ginger – Thanks for stopping by! I am definitely going to put it to the kids to come up with other ways to use their phones. Hopefully there are some creative responses. I love the fact they can bluetooth stuff to the whiteboard – am going to take full advantage of that!
Kate Olson on April 21st, 2008 5:44 am

Jess -

I’m so happy you were able to use the texting races idea! I really want to try this out in my classroom, but since cell phones are banned in school I’d have to jump through a lot of hoops to get permission. You’ve inspired me to think about trying this next year (we only have a little over a month of school left this year) – thanks!
Dean Shareski on April 21st, 2008 8:51 am

I’d love for you to get in touch with the teacher in my district who did the same thing. It would be cool for you to swap ideas with her.

http://ideasandthoughts.org/2008/02/05/exploring-cellphones-as-learning-tools/

I also started a wiki.

http://t9ers.wikispaces.com/

If you do, email me.
Anne Mirtschin on April 21st, 2008 6:10 pm

Well done Jess. Very creative uses of phones. Amazing how ideas come spur of the moment. I still want to bluetooth photos from their phones into their folders, but we have been so busy doing other things.