The Innovative Educator has a fairly long blog post proposing a number of ways that schools could use students’ cell phones to increase engagement with reading and writing in the classroom. The piece starts with the startling assertion that texting actually helps students’ grasp of grammar, and goes on to list some interesting ideas for ways cell phones could help kids learn.

Some of them have to do with using phones to text notes or journals to themselves, or send text messages to teachers so they can offer feedback without fear of being embarrassed in front of their peers. And then there’s Textnovel, which is a social networking site that lets people read or write novels, journals, or other material on their cell phones. The article offers several ways in which the site could be useful for classroom study.

We’ve mentioned proposals for using cell phones in education before. It’s a complicated issue, made more so by the way schools frequently treat student cell phones as forbidden technology. But as time marches on and technology gets cheaper, they’re getting more common, not less. If they can be harnessed for promoting education, why shouldn’t they be?

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