For the past 3.5 years I've been on the front line waging war against students with cell phones in my classroom. From the accidental ring to the kid playing during testing, I've come to know the cell phone slouch very well. Much like the war against drugs, I'm starting to feel that it's a losing proposition. Rather than spending all of that time and effort enforcing rather unenforcible rules, I think we need to focus on education and productive uses of cell phones.
I spent the day at a CSIU workshop on technology in the classroom. The first couple of presentations were ok, but nothing exciting. The first wasn't even on technology, but reading. The second focused on using spreadsheets and web apps, again, nothing too exciting. After lunch, however, I met the man who changed my mind on allowing cell phones in the classroom. He made some excellent points about cell phone use and I'm not saying that I want kids texting and talking during class, but as proliferous and ubiquitous as they are, I might as well harness their potential. We saw some great polling sites (Wiffiti and Poll Everywhere) that can be used in the place of expensive classroom response systems that are free and use texting as their means of response. We saw other applications that turn the phone into a mobile podcast recorder (Yodio) that can be used to record presentations or other such things. Our school currently has a policy that cell phones are not allowed out of the lockers. I'm sure that parent pressure is going to end up changing that policy as well. Education is about attracting student interest and keeping them engaged. Anything that I can do to keep them actively engaged with the material is most likely a good thing. If that means relying on cell phones, I'm all for it.
On another note, I had a great run today. Healing from my nasty cut has not been fun. I now have a very thick scab on my left shin and just wearing pants and having them rub along it creates a very unpleasant burning pain anywhere the scab is touched. On Monday, I decided to see how running felt. Being too cold for shorts, I had to wear the running pants and I figured their mesh interior would really be painful. More than that, though, I was worried that the pounding would produce unbearable pain. I was very surprised that neither happened. I went for a brief run and went on to worry that I missed my training window for the Humdinger on March 6. I went for a 5.6 miler Tuesday and it felt a little rough. I went for a 7.2 miler today and it felt great. I did the return trip about 3 minutes faster than the out and I finished with an overall good pace and feeling strong. My goal is under 71 minutes and beating my former student again.
I finally saw Avatar last weekend. It was the most expensive movie I ever saw. Not only were tickets an extra $3 for the fashion glasses, but we also had the $30 for the babysitter. I liked it. I'm not sure it was worth $50, but I liked it and 3D has really come a long way since the last movie I saw. I'm not sure if every movie needs to be 3D, but it did make things a bit more immersive. The best part may have been the Clash of the Titans preview.
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