Week 2 - Assessment Reflection 1 (De Bono's Hats)

Once again, the never-ending debate is raised once again, should mobile phones be allowed and integrated into the classroom as part of digital pedagogy? Can they actually help student’s learning and education? Should the strict rules that once ruled supreme be scratched to make way for the new age of digital pedagogies? These are all extremely important questions raised by the recent activity upon De Bono’s hats with the core idea of mobile phones in classrooms.
Personally, I believe that mobile phones should be utilised in the classroom as a digital pedagogy but not to the extent that many people believe. It should be used only when necessary and for education purposes only. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you see it, society is changing constantly, pushing more emphasis onto using technology in the classroom. And whilst I may not 100% approve with the move, it is clear to me that education as a whole needs to prepare to integrate mobile phones into the classroom, whether they are ready or not.

By using the wiki activity I found that I was able to organise my thoughts and present them in an easy to read and organised document. The questions, under the headings of the hats, prompted for both higher and lower order thinking about the topic of mobile phones. The fact that I could also read other student’s take on the issue, prompted me to take more time with my answers and tweak them to state exactly what I thought.

The wiki, whilst also prompting me to use higher order thinking more frequently, pushed me, and as I noticed many others, to cycle through the Blooms Tax model instead of just stating the obvious with some information that we had located or already had floating around. I even noticed also that whilst I was engaging with the questions towards the end of the activity, I had begun to consider different ways to integrate mobile phones into my own classrooms – aligning with another extremely helpful model, the SAMR model.

The wiki, whilst currently being used as part of my studies for this class, prompted me to also begin considering uses for it in my own classroom. The wiki is wonderfully structured and with its constant availability to update and tweak pages when required, demonstrated how effective this type of technology could be. And after some investigation, I found that there were many sites just like this one that were also available as an application on phones. This wiki however demonstrated to be the most ‘people’ friendly, bar the editing process when multiple people where editing at the same time. (There was a point where I lost some of my work – something which prompted the idea of each student having their own page to edit and add ideas to each week.) 

In conclusion, this activity has allowed me to broaden my mind on the idea of mobile phones in the classroom by using the hats themselves and allowing access to read other student’s responses. This wiki and activity in turn have demonstrated how friendly and beneficial technology can be when used correctly. It also allowed me to reflect upon how I would use technology in the classroom, whether it be mobile phones or wiki pages.