Smartphone’s and smart teaching

Nowadays, smartphone’s, tablets and laptops are indispensable devices for many students. Not only in social life, also in education. I cannot think of losing my laptop or smartphone, it would take ages to get together all my contacts and my files. You probably know someone who said: “I lost my phone, so I lost my life’’.

These devices are being used in classrooms for many reasons and in many forms: to take notes, for group work, and during lectures in large classrooms.

A friend of mine teaches at an University of Applied Sciences. Every time when he starts teaching the first class to a new group of young students, he asks all students to shut off their Smartphone and put it in the box that is next to his desk. Nothing is more irritating to him than looking at a large group of students in their seats while many of them constantly look between their legs: waiting for the latest useless information and sending off a very important whatsapp or tweet. Students think they can listen to the teacher and use the phone at the same time, but they suffer from what I call ‘’continuous partial attention.’’

His explanation must be very convincing since hardly any of the students oppose the idea and after a few minutes of discussion they all put their phones into the box. And what happens the second week? All students without hesitation put their phones in the box again. And so the next weeks, until the course ends. At one point, when all students were gone after class, he even found two phones in the box!

At the end of the course one student came up to him and acknowledged that he had learnt more without the phone, compared to other classes because he was less distracted.

This story proves to me: no phones into the classrooms! When shall we introduce this at Tilburg University?

Hans-Georg van Liempd (51) is program manager internationalisation at TiU and president of EAIE. He blogs for Univers.

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