Abstract:

Currently in its fourth generation, mobile phone technology, has impacted society's way of life and has rapidly been adopted by young people. This gives them the opportunity to use it as an educational tool.

The current era established at the beginning of the 1990s is known as the information or knowledge era which is characterized by globalization - in which we are currently living-. Knowledge era has as an important feature, the constant change of information technology. This era of technological development is known as digital gap, which has been a recognized phenomenon related to scientific aspects such as technological devices, access, use, consumption, ownership, technological convergence, among others (Almanza and Rodriguez, 2011).

Along these years, generations have been confronted with unforeseen and turbulent changes on a more frequent basis. For Tapscott (2009) the way in which the youth, baptised by him as Net Generation, uses and shapes the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and mobile phones, influences social change, where young people have habits different from the ones of previous generations. This is why it is important to identify the form of ownership, use and frequency of these tools by young people in their daily lives.

The constant changes in technology are relevant in all fields. These innovations have had a major impact on young people's way to communicate and tackle various fields, including the education context.

Innovation in ICTs is changing the learning way of young people and how teachers teach. There are digital tools found on the Web that provide different strategies that encourage students' collaboration, research and interaction. These tools that were not necessarily created with learning purposes enable and facilitate new generations’ innovative possibilities to obtain, store, classify, share, communicate and work together, among other things.

Mobile phones, mobile devices that facilitate access to the network, are becoming tools that young people use as an extension of themselves, to get access to the use of digital tools that enable or facilitate their learning.

This quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional research aims to: identify the use that UPAEP students give to Smartphone with social and educational purposes. An instrument with 18 items was applied to a sample of 240 UPAEP students, with a 95% confidence level and a 7% margin of error.

To conclude, we can say that the students in this university use their Smartphone in general for social purposes, the majority of students use their Smatphones at least 30 minutes a day for activities related to their learning, and that teachers in general, use and promote activities supported by information technology.

Keywords:

Smartphone, social network, learning, information technologies.