I find myself growing increasingly more excited to begin teaching. And by exciting, I also mean anxious. I am constantly thinking of what I want to do in my classroom, what rules I want to have, how I will have my syllabus set up, what I will do for bonus points...I'm becoming obsessed. And student teaching is still a whole year away!! So I definitely need to start writing some of my ideas down in a retrievable place so that I can revisit them later and not have to remember them for a whole year. Since documenting our educational ideas is the entire of this blog, I decided I would jot one down in this post.
We have been talking about the increasing amount of technology in students' social lives and in the classroom. Although we need to integrate technology into the classroom to fit the students' learning styles and preferences, and to add multimodality and different levels of learning, we also need to find a separation and gain control of the students' use of technology while in class, aka the cellphones. If how students are with cellphones in class is only a foreshadowing of what they will be like when I am finally a teacher, than I need a plan of action. Hopefully one that works. This is what I came up with:
I will have two baskets: one for the cell phones and one filled with candy and small oddities. If the students place their cellphone in the basket, they will be allowed a piece of candy or whatever is in the basket that day. I think somedays I will bring in brownies or maybe something even more entreating. Especially on group project days or computer lab days when it is more difficult to supervise the students. I cannot decide if I will have the baskets on my desk so that the students can help themselves, or if I will go around the desks with baskets while I take roll so that I can make sure no one is taking candy without putting their phone. I also thought about giving bonus points to whoever turns their phone in everyday, or perhaps having a pizza party if everyone in the class puts their phone in the basket everyday. Obviously, keeping track of which students put their phones would take more monitoring but I think it would be worth it.
I would like to feedback on this from anyone who likes or dislikes the idea :)
I really like your idea about trying to give students an award for putting their phones out of the way for the duration of the class. With my experience in field, this is something that I would only try with middle school because I don't think that students in high school will follow it as well, especially if it's for every class period. When students get to high school they should be aware of what is expected of them by that point. All in all I believe it is a good idea to at least try out sometime. You won't know until you do.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Janet on the high school thing for two reasons. One, a lot of schools have food policies about giving the students candy and such. It might be an administrative problem if they find out your giving out food to students. Two, it is like Janet said, "...they should be aware of what is expected of them..." I think this is a great idea and it's important to try and bond with your students, but I am not sure if this could be the best way. I would absolutely try it at the middle school level, but be cautious with the high schoolers. They might look to take advantage to, like bringing in an old phone to throw it in the basket turned off, while they keep theirs.
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