What Every Teacher Should Ask For...

With the school year now into full swing, teachers have settled down into a pattern of how they manage their classroom and their students understand what is expected of them. So, why should you do something different? Well, adding this one thing to your classroom could make a significant difference in how you and your students work and how you connect with your families.

Every teacher should ask their parents for their old SmartPhone. The phone only has to meet three requirements.

1. The phone has to have a camera. More megapixels is better, but if it is in the 5-6 megapixel range you are good to go. 
2. The phone has to be able to connect to Wi-Fi and connect to the "App Store" of choice (iOS or Android)  If it can connect to 802.11g standard you are fine. 
3. The phone has to have an intact screen and include the charger.

If you could get a few of these phones from your parents, you could completely digitize your classroom.  They can take all of their personal information off and do a "Factory Reset" of the device before they give it to you. Just think of how many old SmartPhones there are sitting in drawers collecting dust.

You would need to have an e-mail account to set up on the phone, if you are in a school that uses Google Apps for Education, you could ask your district administrator for a separate account for this purpose, like "MrsSmith@yourschool.org". This way students can use the scanning station in the back of the room and have everything sent to this account. If you have the sharing settings on this account where the "My Drive" is shared with all of the students in the class, they can go in from their account and retrieve their scanned documents. Both iOS and Android have scanning apps for their phones, which are usually free, so no need to set up an account with a credit card that could potentially be charged.

You could set up a document scanning station like the one below for students to digitize their work.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Phone-Scanning-Photo-Stand/

There are actually cardboard versions of cell phone scanning stations that you can purchase for about $20 or build your own from instructables.com

What if you had more than one phone? Get Google Cardboard which makes a cell phone a 3D viewer and allows your students to take virtual field trips. Think about being able to allow students to do this in rotation centers or for enrichment.

Students could take pictures or video and create their own videos, upload them to the 'class account' and then pull it over to their account and create narrated slideshows or short videos using a variety of different free tools to create videos. On iOS, I always recommend Splice for starters, on the Android platform I recommend Magisto to start. There are plenty of apps on both platforms that will allow you to edit images and video quickly and easily. If you have any computers in your classroom, YouTube has its own video editor found here.

You can have students read aloud and record them quickly and easily. Evernote has an included voice recorder, but there are plenty of other apps that can record an .mp3 file, which can be saved and transferred.

Why is this important?

At the beginning of each school year, teachers should be asking every parent for their e-mail address. As mentioned above, it is the quickest and fastest way to communicate with them, but more importantly, you and their child can share lots of information with them on a regular basis. This provides the parent a view of your classroom and helps them to understand what their child is doing in school and makes the parent your partner in the education of their child.

What are other things you could do? 

• Use Blogger to send out your weekly newsletter home to parents, which now includes pictures, videos and all sorts of media that encourages parents to read it. (Blogger has some advantages where you can limit who can view the blog, etc. which is why I prefer it to other services.) I had a teacher tell me one time that a parent refused to provide the teacher with their e-mail address, I told the teacher that if she started sending out more information using e-mail addresses, she would quickly have every parent's e-mail address. You know ... Parents talk! 
• A slide show of student work art products. A small slide show of the project of the week. 
• Videos which will assist the parent in helping their student with homework.
• Recording students reading aloud to document fluency over time and document growth. 
• Add materials to a student portfolio, which can serve as the focus of a parent teacher conference. 
• The possibilities are endless....

So, when are you going to ask your parents to donate their old SmartPhones for you to use in your class? 

Any Questions, please leave comments below.