Five Ways Students Can Use Their Cell Phones in the Classroom
Want to do something that will shock your students? Ask them to take out their cell phones in class! Usually, teachers are fighting the good fight and asking students to put their phones away during class. But, with these five interactive teaching methods, students can use their phones in class to their hearts content.
Kahoot is a fun game that the whole class can participate in. Kids learn and and fun doing it at the same time. Kahoot presents teacher made multiple choice questions where the students answer and in doing so, compete against their classmates. Students simply download the accompanying app, sign in to the Kahoot that you created, and off you go. Students uses their phones to choose the best answer that is presented in front of the class.
Create an account and you’re off and running. As the teacher, create your quiz, make it public (where anyone can search and use it) or make it private. Create your quiz adding pictures and time limits for each question. Quizizz works great with math classes as there is a symbol dash board. Teacher’s also have the option to play the quiz live or share it for homework. When the quiz is done, go to your dashboard and click on a particular report for that quiz to view specific results.
Pear Deck is an awesome classroom tool where students can use their phone to participate in a variety of questions. Questions in Pear Deck question types include short or long answer, true/false, and multiple choice. Drawing answers in Pear Deck is also possible. Pear Deck also has a feature called “Takeaways” where the student can view the questions and their answer at the conclusion of the session. When combined with the Google Sheets add-on Flubaroo, teachers can use Pear Deck as a formal assessment tool.
Google Slides Q & A
Slides Q & A uses the power of Google Slides to get kids thinking and inquire about certain aspects of a Google Slides presentation. The cool thing is, this is done while you’re giving it! Students use their phone to pose questions about your Slides presentation. While doing so, they can see other questions posed by other students and vote those questions up if they have the same question. The teacher can view the questions as they come in on their dashboard. At the conclusion of the presentation, the teacher can address those questions with the most votes while displaying them in front of the class.
It’s the Space Race game that gets students excited about Socretive. But there are other ways to use Socrative. You can use it as a quiz, as an exit ticket question, or asking a “quick question” to do a quick check for understanding. To join, students simply use their phone to enter their room name and their off and running! But it’s the Space Race that really get’s the students involved. Students team up (could be pairs or small groups) and choose a color. Teams answer at their own pace. Each right answer moves their rocket ship closer to the end. Give a wrong answer, and your ship remains stagnant. The winner is the ship that either reaches the end or gets closest to it.
