Cell Phones Make Headway in Education

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Round-the-Clock Learning

Industry researcher Strategy Analytics projects that total North American smart phone sales will surge to 70.3 million units in 2012, from 18.3 million last year. While education accounts for a sliver of all iPhone sales now, it could reach 20% to 25% of the total in coming years, says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research.

Some carriers are already seeing growth in sales of smart phones and wireless services to colleges and schools. Sprint Nextel (S) has seen its educational subscriber base rise 7% in the past year, to 750,000 users nationwide, even as the total number of subscribers has declined. Some of its phones, such as the Samsung Instinct, are used for campus safety, but others are for learning. Instructors want students to be able to check class schedules or take quizzes on the go. "They want a 24-7 learning environment," says Ed Davalos, national director of educational sales at Sprint.

Software makers are eager to capitalize on demand for educational software that would make smart phones more effective in schools. Handango sells about 90 mobile educational applications, including a portable Swedish dictionary, for Samsung's Blackjack smart phone alone. Apple's App Store, which opened on July 11, offers more than 80 educational iPhone applications, such as those helping kids tell time or learn Italian. Many colleges are also building custom software and mobile-friendly Web sites. University of Maryland, for instance, is putting finishing touches on a mobile portal, where students can go to check out the dining menu or register for classes.

Spare That Gazelle

And Hewlett-Packard has recently added to its team of researchers working on Mediascape, a set of tools teachers can use to build cell-phone games for classroom use. Interest among teachers has been "far above anything we've expected," says Phil McKinney, chief technology officer for the personal systems group at HP. "Educators just gravitated to this." A game called "Savannah," which was developed in Britain using Mediascape, lets students play lions and gazelles whose geographic locations are tracked via cell phones. Whenever a "lion" finds a "gazelle," the virtual gazelle gets eaten. But if the lions eat all the gazelles, they end up dying of hunger. "By the end, the kids learn the balance of life," McKinney explains.

At many schools, the use of cell phones in the classroom is still in an experimental phase. Qualcomm equipped 100 students at four North Carolina schools with HTC smart phones for an entire school year. By the end of the year, the kids were spending more than an hour a day on the phones learning math, getting help on algebra.com, and texting homework questions to friends. Qualcomm plans to release complete results of the study in October.

A big hurdle to cell-phone use is resistance by teachers. Liz Kolb, who teaches courses on new technologies for teachers at Madonna University in Livonia, Mich., and at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, now requires her students to try various cell-phone exercises with their kids. Over the past several years, the children have used mobiles to create raps about math, answer foreign-language quizzes, and record theatrical radio programs. Kolb says most of her teacher-students arrive at the first class "with zero interest in using cell phones for learning." But by the end, 30% to 40% are using it regularly in their classrooms, she says. Her book on cell-phone learning, Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education, will be published by the International Society for Technology in Education and come out in October.

As far as Kolb and others are concerned, educators have more to gain from embracing cell phones than they do from keeping them out of the classroom. "The educational segment is lagging behind the sophistication of the students," says McKinney of HP. "They need to catch up."

Does your school use cell phones for instruction? Should it? Tell us why or why not in the reader comment section.

Kharif is a senior writer for BusinessWeek.com in Portland, Ore.