Lynne Horn

It was at Communicate.06 last year that I was persuaded that setting up a class blog might be useful – at that time I had only been using them to practise reading skills with classes.

This year I was back in Stirling for Communicate.07.  This time I spoke about the use that mobile phones might have in the classroom.  I coopresented with Sharon Tonner of the High School of Dundee who has been using them with her primary children.  Many were keen to go back and try out this technology in their own classrooms – I’ll upload my presentation notes here later when I can get it off the laptop.

Most questions were about child and teacher protection – in fact most of the things we talked about were really using the phone as a digital tool, camera, video, recorder, Bluetooth etc rather than as a phone, so details of numbers are not exchanged.

One thing all were agreed on was that we need to teach pupils the educational uses of new technologies – MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, mobile phones and iPods etc.  At the moment we seem to ban them because we ourselves do not fully understand them.  When they are used inappropriately our knee jerk reaction is to ban them – interesting when there is an outbreak of graffiti around the school we don’t ban pencils…