Powerful "Blackberry"

I can not tell exactly when I noticed of the portable devices like ipod, mp3, mp4, iphone...and especially the various brands of cell phone with multiple-functions are being brought into class by my students.



At very beginning, I was quite upset with this distraction caused by it. Students are constantly wearing earphones to listen to music, navigating on the tiny screen of the cell phone with their heads down when they are doing classwork, or even when teacher is giving lecture. I eventually had to collect them from the students and put all of them on my teaching table, and guess how many of these devices are there on my table? Almost the equal number of the students in the class. And more than half of my students own "Balckberry" , which is the most popular brand of a cellphone.

Cellphones so far have not been an educational tool, they have been distraction. It almost laughable that the cellphone industry is pushing a study showing that cellphone will make kids smarter." Janet Bass, a spokeswoman for the " American Federation of Teachers.


However, the frequent use of these cellphone of my students on daily basis gradually changed the way I thought of it. I started to notice of the power of these portable devices, the benefits my students gained from owning this device during school days at ISB.

(1) Students can check their powerschool grade constantly. When I enter the grade of their work into powerschool, students can immediately access to the powerschool via blackberry. From time to time, right during classtime, students check the grades asking for more details of the grade on a particular work, reminding me of entering the grade for the make-up work they
did...and interestingly, I come to realise that students are becoming more conscientious and clearly aware of their school work with the capability of being able to access to their grade results at once via blackberry.

(2) Students are able to create project work via blackberry anywhere and anytime when they are available. Two students were playing the role-play, and the other one was holding that powerful blackberry making the video-story, then published or shared this audio file with online media tool right away.

(3) One Student lost his study-guide paper. He wanted to study it after school time. So he came asking me to upload this paper into PatherNET, and he could access to patherNET via his blackberry.

I am indeed impressed by the power of blackberry. I would love to think positively on how to embed this blackberry into my teaching and learning activities, although I have not done much with it for the time being.

Indeed, the mobile device can be well-used for the purpose of making learning more easier and more fun, as mobile phone has become an important part of young people's life, and why not invite blackberry to campus as one of the study tools?

" ...mobiles have been evolving rapidly in recent years. Multi-touch interfaces, GPS capability, and the ability to run third party applications make today's mobile device an increasingly flexible tool that is readily adapted to a wide range of tasks for social networking, learning and productivity. In some places, mobile devices like iphone have already begun to supplant portable computers as the internet-capable device of choice." [Horizon Report]