Abstract:

Due to ever increasing digitalisation, both opportunities and challenges are simultaneously offered by the proliferation of laptops and tablets in the classrooms of contemporary schools. Furthermore, technology provided by school is not the only technology available to the students. In Sweden, almost every secondary student today has their own mobile phone (Skolverket, 2016). Students’ use of mobile phones in school is an ongoing debate in many countries. In Sweden, the lack of a government policy about the use of mobile phones has had the consequence that schools differ in their approach, from a complete ban to promoting use of mobile phones.

This paper addresses the role of mobile phones in the classroom from the perspective of the students. The purpose of this case study is to investigate secondary school students’ reasoning about their use of mobile phones in the classroom. What are their perceptions of mobile phone use during lessons in a 1:1 school environment, in which all students have an internet connected laptop provided by the school?

Data consist of focus group discussions with 11 participants in grade eight (13-14 years old) in Sweden. The transcribed data was analysed using a qualitative, thematic analysis focused on identifying patterns and variations in the students’ perceptions of mobile phone use in the classroom.

Koole’s Rational Analysis of Mobile Education, FRAME (2006), was used as a framework for analysing the data. From the students’ narratives, the results show that even though every student was provided with a computer by the school, the students used their mobile phones for different purposes in the classroom on an everyday basis, both for leisure and school activities. The students reported differences in use depending on a particular subject or teacher. What the students thought of the appropriateness of using mobile phones during lessons was individual, mostly dependent on the purpose and content of the lessons.

The mobile phones were found to be either used as a complement to the computers or sometimes as the technology that the students preferred. However, the study also showed that use of mobile phones in class is not solely initiated by the students: on many occasions the school assignments required that mobile phones were used during lessons. Sometimes this was even explicitly encouraged by the teacher, as the following excerpt indicates.

X [name of teacher] always says “use the mobile phone as a calculator”, because we always have them [the mobile phones] with us to the lessons, this rather than X having to get out the usual calculators.

Furthermore, results also show that the students have concerns about the disruption that mobile phones may cause, and that inappropriate usage may create a disturbance.

The students’ narratives indicate that with mobile phones present in the classroom, there is a shift from teacher-centred learning to personalized student-centred learning. This is not only because of the use of mobile phones in the classroom by the students, but also what the students reveal about the teachers, who in some respect, are taking the students’ mobile phones for granted as tools for school work.

References:
[1] Koole, M. L. (2006). The framework for the rational analysis of mobile education (FRAME) model: An evaluation of mobile devices for distance education. Athabasca University, Alberta.
[2] Skolverket. (2016). IT-användning och IT-kompetens i skolan. Skolverkets IT-uppföljning 2015.