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In this essay, Philip and Garcia argue that visions of mobile devices in the classroom often draw on assumptions about the inherent interests youth have in these devices, the capability of these interests to transfer from out-of-school contexts to the classroom, and the capacity for these new technologies to equalize the educational playing field. These overly optimistic portrayals minimize the pivotal value of effective teaching and are implicitly or explicitly coupled with political agendas that attempt to increasingly control and regiment the work of teachers. Through discussing student interest and issues of educational technology in urban schoob and highlighting the affordances and limitations of the texts, tools, and talk that teachers might facilitate with these devices, the authors offer a teacher-focused perspective that is sorely missing in the contemporary debates about using mobile technologies in schools.
The anticipation had been brewing. Students knew they were about to receive brand-new Android smartphones. And for school! The moment they had them in their hands, their thumbs moved rapidly as they raced to figure out the phones' features. The teacher perfunctorily went through the PowerPoint on how to use the phones, the students correcting him on the instructions they found largely irrelevant. The scene of students enthusiastically engaged with mobile phones and clumsily guided by a "relic" of the predigitai age perfectly fit Prensky's (2006) popular narrative of "digital natives" and Rosen, Carrier, and Cheever's (2010) trendy image of technologically sophisticated and multitasking iGen teens. However, these romantic portraits of youth "fully engaged by 21st century digital lives" (Prensky, 2006, p. 9) began to blur as soon as the bytes hit the airwaves.
In our work as former urban high school teachers and current teacher educators, and as educational researchers who are collaborating on a project that uses mobile phones to teach about computational thinking and data science in urban high schools, we have seen tfiis image repeat itself time and again. The idea is always a simple one: technological devices, particularly smartphones, offer individualized learning opportunities. More importandy, kids mink that the devices are cool. However, transferring the capabilities and coolness of youth-endorsed devices into classroom learning is not as simple as handing them out and turning them on. In fact, what we see is quite...