A PRIMARY school teacher is using mobile phones in a ground-breaking initiative to help children learn.
Sharon Tonner believes phones can be a powerful educational tool – but her ideas come as fellow teachers voice growing concern over their use to film playground attacks or to post illicit pictures of staff on the internet.
In some schools
pupils have been banned from switching phones on or bringing them in at all. But Ms Tonner, at Dundee High junior school, is trying to turn round this anti-mobile culture.
As the school's first ICT specialist, she teaches primary sevens to use Bluetooth, camera, video and voice recorder functions and says other teachers could use these to help pupils learn.
She said: "They can use the voice recorders for French, for example. Normally when children have to learn words when they get home they can't remember how to say them.
"But the teacher could Bluetooth recordings of how to pronounce words. They would be able to look at the words and hear them at the same time so they should learn them more quickly.
"Another use is in music. They get home and have the words in front of them but can't remember how the music goes. It only takes two minutes to Bluetooth a whole class and you can guarantee they'd have it in their ears and listen to it more than they'd read it."
She accepted many teachers would rather not see mobiles in school at all.
She said: "They still do see mobile phones negatively. I think people see computers as very negative because of cyber-bullying but teachers have to embrace what the children are using.
"We have seen how they could be used negatively but we have to learn how to control that. Five years ago when they put computers in classrooms many teachers wouldn't touch them. Within ten years we will be using mobile phones and hand-held computers to help pupils with their school work."
Dr Ross Deuchar, a senior lecturer in education at Strathclyde University, supported the idea of harnessing children's knowledge of mobile technology.
He said: "There is a place for drawing on children's understanding of text messaging. We must tap into this other kind of literacy – a digital literacy."
The EIS teaching union last year advised phones should be either banned or switched off during the school day.
