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Abstract
This study examined the survey responses of 628 high school students in a large urban school district to determine their perceptions of mobile phone use in the classroom. Findings indicated that the majority of students (90.7%) were using a variety of mobile phone features for school-related work. Student support for instructional uses of phones, however, was not universal. Only 73.8% of the students supported integrating mobile phones into the classroom instruction, while 70.6% believed that mobile phones supported learning. Students had serious concerns about the disruptions caused by using mobile phones in the classroom and by inappropriate usage.
Key Words: high school, mobile phones, mobile learning, technology integration
When mobile phones first appeared in the classroom in the 1990s, they were perceived by teachers as classroom disruptors and banned by schools. In the ensuing decades, mobile phones have evolved until they can perform most of the tasks performed by a desktop computer, and do so from almost anywhere. In 2012, UNESCO asserted that mobile devices, because of their ubiquity and portability, were positioned to influence teaching and learning in a way personal computers never did (p. 14). Ninety percent of American adults own a mobile phone (Pew Internet Research, 2014,) and almost two-thirds are now smartphone owners (Lenhart, 2015). Seventy-eight percent of teens own a mobile phone (Madden, Lenhart, Duggan, Cortesi, & Gasser, 2013), and nearly three-quarters own or have access to a smartphone (Len- hart, 2015). Access to mobile phones is seen as a way to provide teachers and students with a wide range of benefits that are associated with mobile learning (M-learning) including:
(a) offering students multiple entry points and learning paths and allowing for differentiated learning; (b) enabling multiple modality via mobile devices by which students have a tool to create a different learning artifact to suit their needs; (c) supporting student improvisation in situ, student may improvise as needed within the context of learning (e.g., take pictures to illustrate learning connections); and (d) supporting learning creation on the move with an ease of creating and sharing artifacts. (Liu, Scordino, Renata, Navarrete, Yujung, & Lim, 2015, p. 356)
In addition to providing teachers and students with these benefits, the pervasiveness of mobile phones can assist schools in addressing both...