What Can We Achieve With The Mobile in Class?

The use of ICT, thanks to the pandemic, has increased remarkably in the classroom. Before the pandemic it was impossible to think about using mobile in class, now it is one more resource, and is that considered ICT?

The majority of teachers and students understood by ICT the use and management of computers in our subjects. The proper use of the calculator was also included in that concept, but education, like life, changes by the second.

The pandemic has exposed the shortcomings of students in things as basic as preparing a document or managing a data table. They are experts in applications and I learn a lot from them because everything, in its fair measure, benefits us. The idea is to take advantage of the use of mobile phones in the classroom.

The pandemic has changed the world. An affirmation that we repeat on a regular basis without realizing the background of said assertion, while we look forward to returning to what was our normal life. However, we are aware that some of these changes are here to stay.

"The pandemic has discovered the shortcomings of students in things as basic as handling a data table."

The state of alarm confronted teachers with one of the biggest challenges in education: teaching, transmitting, and educating without being in the classroom. At that time, ICTs became our salvation, they allowed us to create virtual classrooms from which we tried to continue our work. The mobile played a fundamental role. Before the pandemic, it timidly began to enter the classroom as an educational tool, not without protests from the community that linked its use to leisure and fun for students, without taking into account its educational potential.

From my humble point of view, I think it can bring us more than take away. Good use of mobile will make us be closer to our students and if the relationship with them is good, it is likely that the academic results will be better. Everyone knows that a good relationship with your students, in most cases, corresponds to a better aptitude for the subject and if the subject is mathematics, we have much more to gain.

What does this new way of educating consist of? Many of our students only have a mobile phone to access the internet, there are no computers or tablets at home and that cannot mean a delay in their learning, so the first thing we must do, in all subjects is to teach them, with the device they have, to make reports, tables, search for information and filter it well, learn to be critical with themselves and with the information they handle.

"The state of alarm confronted teachers with one of the greatest challenges in education: teaching, transmitting, and educating without being in the classroom."

For example, if we ask them to look for information about an important person in the life of a country, they should not copy the first thing they find, they should look at various websites and be able to get ideas from different sites. However, this is difficult for them because they are not capable of understanding that everything that is on the Internet is not true and that they have to be compared. In this sense, I always tell them that when their relatives want to buy a car, they go to several dealerships, even if it is the same car, to be able to see what they are offered in different places since this is more or less the same. In this way, we are helping our students to acquire "Digital Competence", "Linguistic Competence" and "Learning to learn".

The good thing about this way of learning is that each of our students can go as far as they want, and in this way, we can attend to their needs. So, we start from a common script for the whole class and each one will advance at a different pace without anyone seeing their learning diminished by having or not having a computer at home.

What else can we achieve in the classroom with the mobile? Our students, in general, are very visual, they retain a lot of information through images and we have to take advantage of this. We have applications that help us to review the contents of the unit that we are teaching, and websites with maps so that they can review both the political and physical maps. On other websites or apps, we can propose mathematical exercises so that each one can solve them at their own pace, and what is better, each student gets the exercise in a different order than their partner, guaranteeing to learn.

So I believe, in my humble opinion, that the use of mobile phones in the classroom is here to stay and although we can live without it, we have more to gain if, little by little, we give it an effective presence in our classes.