School embraces learning by cellphone

Hansome Motuhavili, 9, and Fitim Rudi, 11, get the message. Photo / Greg Bowker

Cellphones are banned from many classrooms but at Orakei Primary School they are seen as essential to learning.

The decile 3 school has been given mobile phones to use in the classroom and students are personalising their learning, sharing files with teachers and keeping parents up to date with their progress.

Associate principal Matt Tamariki said many of the children would not get the chance to use new technology if it was not part of the classroom. Allowing low decile children to be excluded from technology would leave them disadvantaged at secondary school.

Each afternoon the children in Year 5 to 8 classes clear their desks of paper and pens and use phones to complete tasks.

Mr Tamariki can send lessons to the phones and students can let him know how they are going by either texting or file sharing.

Lessons can be conducted exclusively through the phones, or with the phones as aids to the written work.

According to Toni Twiss, director of e-Learning and ICT facilitator for Waikato Secondary Schools, digital literacy is an essential skill teachers can cultivate with students.

Orakei Primary School is operating two programmes it calls "m" learning.

The first is Mobile Maori Learning and provides podcast lessonsfor playback via mobile phone.

The other is Mobile Learning for Boys. This includes an online digital reading clinic to focus on improving reading comprehension, spelling and writing skills of students.

Eleven-year-old Fitim Rudi, who comes from Kosovo, is learning Maori via podcasts the teacher programmes into the mobile phone.

He says it makes it much easier to listen to the pronunciation and work at his own pace.

Mr Tamariki is also incorporating video into lessons. Students took footage from the Orakei marae and put together a short film about their visit.

He said the students should be able to use the internet functions to Twitter teachers and each other when the school worked out policies for accessing social networking sites.

Mr Tamariki approached Vodafone to support the school's technology initiative and was overwhelmed when 18 new laptops called netbooks and 18 3G mobiles arrived.

Though many of the children had not used the gadgets before "they took to them like natives".

He said the lessons had taught children to use the internet and phones for activities other than playing games or checking social sites like Bebo.

Meanwhile a literacy professor, Tom Nicholson of Massey University, is trying out a new approach to help struggling readers using the software application Skype.

Skype allows users to make voice calls over the internet and using a web camera enables face-to-face dialogue. Discussions with school principals have prompted Professor Nicholson to look at developing a nationwide scheme for children with no access to reading tuition.

He said Skype had enormous potential to lift reading levels of children without access to one-on-one tutoring.

He plans to expand his programme, in partnership with schools, to provide after-hours access to school computers for those using the programme. He is also seeking sponsorship from telecommunications companies.