Smartphones Really Do Make Students Smarter
The cellphone industry has been doing its homework and has come up with a fun and functional way to boost the math skills of American students exponentially the cellphone industry has been doing its homework and has come up with a fun and functional way to boost the math skills of American students exponentially. How? Spend more time on cellphones in the classroom. At the recent mobile learning 09 conference in Washington, a wireless industry trade group presented research – sponsored by cellphone chip maker Qualcomm – that shows smartphones really do make students smarter. Critics of pooh-pooh the effort as a ploy to break into the lucrative educational market. Steve Wozniak often expresses his thoughts on the topic. But proponents claim that they are simply making the same child of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to schools since the 1980s. The only difference between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper, and more grow after by students. Many teenagers already have smartphones and use them regularly to access online stuff and share music and pictures with friends. Digital millennial consulting, which conducted the research, has contacted school districts in Chicago, San Diego and Florida about buying specially equipped phones for the classroom.
It projects that wireless companies could sell 10 million to 15 million phones in the next few years as a result of this effort. The digital millennial study found four North Carolina schools in low income neighborhoods, where ninth-and 10th-grade math students were given high-end cellphones running Microsoft Windows Mobile software and programs designed to assist them with algebra studies. The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problem and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25 percent better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes.