Mobile Phones in Classrooms (Thomas Philip and Antero Garcia)
Thomas M. Philip is at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies,University of California, Los Angeles and Antero D. Garcia is in Department of English, Colorado State University
A portion of the article appears here. For the entire piece, see: Harvard Educational Review Vol. 83 No. 2 Summer 2013 or read here: PhilipGarcia_HER Full citations listed in this article can be found in PDF
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 predigital 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