In an age where technology has jumped to the forefront of everyone’s priorities, many teachers have banned the use of cell phones in their classrooms.
As a news staff, this lead us to beg the question: in an age where just about everything we do involves some form of technology, shouldn’t we be able to utilize the piece of technology we use the most to aid with learning in the classroom?
Now obviously different teachers have different opinions on cell phones in the classroom. Some say all students will do is get on Facebook or Twitter and won’t pay the least bit of attention to their professors. We as a news staff decided that if given the chance, we could actually use our cell phones to help us in class.
The first example that came to our minds would be using Google to help clarify a term our teacher was talking about during class. Being able to have the internet readily available to us provides what we believe to be an advantage that our generation has that previous generations did not have access to, and we as a group feel like when teachers ban our cell phones in class, they are banning us access to information that maybe they couldn’t provide or we didn’t previously understand.
To gain some further knowledge and perhaps learn a few different ways we could use cell phones in a positive manner, we reached out to Jennifer Page, Ph.D., an assistant professor of English right here at Northwestern, who actually just began doing research on digital humanities and using technology to enhance students’ classroom experiences.
According to Page, she believes that most professors would “agree that incorporating interactive technology and media in the classroom is an effective way of engaging students.” This word engage intrigued us as a group. Oftentimes when sitting in class, we feel as if lecturing professors never truly capture our attention and therefore we never truly absorb the important information needed to grasp a subject.
We feel that in our generation, technology is what truly “engages” us and helps us retain information. As a group we can state off facts upon facts that we saw on Twitter, but we could hardly remember anything from a lecture we just heard less than an hour ago.
So why would teachers want to take away that access to information that we all carry around with us just because it might become a distraction? We feel like teachers just assume we are going to use the cell phone to ignore what they are saying and watch pointless YouTube videos, but what if using that cell phone helps us better understand the hour long lecture being presented to use in a monotone voice when most of us would rather be asleep.
While reviewing Page’s responses to our questions, one thing became evident: her ongoing research and future findings are not meant to encourage technology to be a replacement for instruction itself, but to view technology as a way in which information is delivered. We as a staff believe this idea from Page could not be any more spot on. We are the technology generation, and many professors have not grasped the concept that this is the way we learn now.
We don’t expect you to allow us to have our cellphones out during tests or answer phone calls in the middle of class to talk about what happened at the basketball game last night, but don’t take away what we have used since our pre-teen years just because you can’t stand not having our undivided attention while you babble on about information that our brains aren’t programmed to retain unless we can watch it, share it or screen shot it.
It’s 2016; we all have cell phones; we’re all legal adults; please don’t put our cell phones in time out when we could use them to learn.