Double Take

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Research Alert

Mobile Computing on the Rise

How do K–12 students use mobile devices in school, and what is their wish for the future? Here are some findings from the Pearson Student Mobile Device Survey 2014:

71 percent of elementary school students, 67 percent of middle school students, and 56 percent of high school students want to use mobile devices in the classroom more than they do now.
Tablet usage is high and growing, especially among younger students. In 2014, 66 percent of elementary school students reported that they regularly used a tablet.
Smartphone usage has increased across all grade levels and is most prevalent among older students. The survey found that 75 percent of high school students regularly use smartphones.
Most students feel that tablets can be game changers in learning, particularly when it comes to improving student engagement.
Only one in six students attends a school that provides every student with a laptop or tablet.
When it comes to their wish list for 2015, students want to use the large size smartphone (or phablet) and the large tablet for their school work.

Conducted by Harris Poll, the survey polled 2,252 students in grades 4 through 12. Pearson Student Mobile Device Survey 2014. National Report: Students in Grades 4–12 is available at www.pearsoned.com/wp-content/uploads/Pearson-K12-Student-Mobile-Device-Survey-050914-PUBLIC-Report.pdf.

Relevant Reads

It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd (Yale University Press, 2014)

Are social media destroying the fabric of society, or are they providing a beneficial "networked public," enabling young people to explore the world around them and stay connected with peers? Following an eight-year exploration of teens' involvement with social media—which included hundreds of interviews with teenagers as well as parents, teachers, librarians, and others—danah boyd rejects both fear mongering and utopian visions. In this book, she discusses myths about issues like privacy, addiction, bullying, danger, inequality, and literacy.

For example, the author contests the public narrative of "a generation of zombified social media addicts who are unable to tear themselves away from the streams of content from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram" (p. 78). An alternative is to think of the hours a teen spends online as the kind of flow defined by Csikszentmihalyi—a state of deep engagement. In other words, today's teens don't use social networks to escape the real world, but as a new way to make social connections and build their own identities.

World Spin

Combating Nomophobia in Taiwan

Nomophobia—that's the fear of being without one's electronic device. And it's on the rise worldwide. Taiwan is taking steps to do something about it by legally obliging parents to curb their children's exposure to electronic devices. Parents whose children are found to use their mobile devices for an "unreasonable" amount of time—one sticking point here is that unreasonable hasn't yet been defined—can be fined $1,600. Spending too much time on electronic devices is now equated with such other vices as smoking, drinking, taking drugs, and chewing betel nuts.

Homework Goes Mobile in Lesotho

The African country of Lesotho is trialing a startup that sends homework lessons and quizzes to students through basic mobile phones. Students receive a call covering the day's schoolwork, then a text-to-speech program reads out multiple-choice questions that the student answers using the phone's keypad. The creators of the program believe this will save teachers time creating, distributing, and grading homework.

ScreenGrabs

An Amazing Afterlife for Your Phone

When conservation technologist Topher White visited the rainforests of Borneo for the first time, he recorded the cacophony of the forest and noted, "If we take the sound of the forest and we actually turn down the gibbons, the insects, and the rest, in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard, was the sound of a chainsaw." In "What Can Save the Forest? Your Used Cell Phone," White unveils a simple, scalable way to stop brutal deforestation. Old smartphones are retrofitted and attached to trees in the rainforest; when they pick up the sound of a chainsaw, they alert a ranger in the field.

Numbers of Note

The percentage of U.S. K–12 teachers surveyed who believe that mobile devices:

Provide a way for students to review materials—77%

Personalize learning—57%

Increase student engagement—55%

Improve school-home communication—52%

Source: Project Tomorrow. (2013). From chalkboards to tablets: The digital conversion of the K–12 classroom, Speak Up 2012 national findings. Irvine, CA: Author. Note: 102,070 educators participated in the survey.