Mobile Phone Educator

How could it be a mere cell phone can be our instructor and used it as one of the resources in gaining knowledge with one tap and just putting it in pocket to increase cognitive development in home and whole wide world.

“I’d rather choose losing my boyfriend than living without phone.”

-a Filipina student

Innovative teaching through technology in a world today makes difference from the teaching we had yesterday.

Mobile phone, what is mobile phone? Is it really possible to have an android teacher? Yes, definitely, perfectly, absolutely YES. But how could it be? We’ll find it later let us define first what mobile phone is.

Some nationalities often say cell phone, and some says mobile phone, now the question is what are the differences and similarities between the two? – Nothing because they are just the same, different names but with the same meaning, the same things that has a powerful structure that only computers could understand, a thing that has an own language and own ways of interpreting human language to computer language, uses codes that could hardly understand by man. I can define mobile phone as super hero; it can do anything, can create everything, can be a friend or could be an enemy depending on how we design it.

The Users

“Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants”, digital natives are those millennial, born in 21^st century with high technologies.

Digital immigrants are those people in the time of “bitay max”, could hardly adapt to the vast changes in technology. BUT! There are millennial who have not yet embrace the fast raging changes in technologies, they are just millennial by age and there are also some immigrants that are digitally native by heart. In our world today, it is very hard to separate human in mobile phones. As I have heard in a group of students, one of them says, “I’d rather choose losing my boyfriend than living without phone” a very heart breaking statement by a college student. I am just wondering how her boyfriend would feel hearing what she said. It might be like a knife stabbing his heart. Well so much for that let’s continue.

If most of the learners used mobile phone, why not integrate technology in educating students? Isolating phone in school is not the solution to hasten the learning of the students. If they want phone why not give them? It is the educator’s advantage when integrating mobile phones in learning. For some reason, learning doesn’t always take place in the four-corner of the classroom. The world gives us so many things to do and to learn.

 And one of the main contributors of a child’s cognitive development is the technology, a technology which includes mobile phone.

 It is very fascinating to know that more than half billion in this world has powerful tool in their pockets. Mobile phones make miles of distance near. My point is that mobile phones are not just for fun, there is a lot of learning we could get from our phone.

According to Marc Prensky an american writer and speaker in educatio in his blog What Can You Learn From A Cell Phone?-Almost Anything! “There are many different kinds of learning and many processes that we use to learn, but among these frequent, time-tested, and effective of these are listening, observing, imitating, questioning, reflecting, trying, estimating, predicting, “what-if” -ing and practicing. All of these learning processes can be done through our cell phones. In addition, the phones compliment short-burst, casual, multi-tasking style of today’s “Digital Native” learners”.

Mobile Applications

Mobile nowadays does a very big role in our lives, it makes our life easy and comfortable, teaches us to the things that we do not know And as a matter of fact, for the digital natives it is very impossible to walk without handling cell phone, without it you’re completely incomplete. One student in Japan says that “When you lose your mobile, you lose part of your brain” with just this statement we could possibly say that mobile phone has imprinted something in our brain by that losing our phone we particularly lose some part of our brain.  Truly mobile phone has a big help in our life, for the students, workers, employees, teachers, and all the other people needs mobile phone. If before we say no man is an island, maybe by now we could say there is a man in an island with a mobile phone. Funny but it touches reality, our phone is not just a pocket buddy it teaches us a lot by the help of mobile applications which fits to our needs, depending on our profession and responsibilities if and only if we design it right, we use it right. The control is in our hand.

But how a mere mobile phone can be our teacher?

Through apps! In our world today, we are just one click away. You just need to specify what you want to learn, search, download, install and boom! For an instant you have your own mobile teacher. Mobile teacher in a sense that in some instances when you are reviewing, doing self-assessment and no teacher is available you have you phone, you second option teacher, but is not meant to replace teachers it is made for the students, for the learners to learn even without in the classroom. Mobile learning or m-learning is also on its way to educate learners in their most convenient time, anywhere in the world. M-learning may contain many apps that will help us boost our knowledge specifically without hesitating others. Using mobile phones to learn does not take the merits oh being a good teacher. it is addressing the different needs of a student to learn, I wonder how some of the teachers strictly prohibited the use  of mobile phones in class well in reality the learners has its  own buddy to learn by himself. Mobile phones can teach us many things, cooking, driving, solving mathematical problems, dancing, and surfing, computing, and interacting in our most convenient time, anywhere around the globe. If you want to learn something just one tap away, it’s about making connections to your prior knowledge up to the present.

by Irene Mae Evangelista Josol