Integrating
Schools can leverage the ways students are already
using mobile digital devices to organize and support learning activities in STEM content areas.
and STEM practices S
hiloh and Jason, two seventh grad- ers at a school in the Sacramento area, are making videos to capture and model linear change. Yesenia
and Beatriz are interviewing their class- mates about their fondness for alligators and jellyfish, and tabulating the results to test hypotheses about bias. Earl is building an interactive, three-dimensional representa- tion of musical melodies. Andrew is creating parametric equations for the motion of his clock. And they’re doing it all on iPods. These vignettes capture a sample of stu-
dent inquiry projects and activities during a two-week pilot study exploring intersections between digital practices learners already engage in with mobile devices, and substan- tive aspects of mathematical practice.
Reconsidering computing in the classroom Part of the appeal of the current gen-
eration of mobile devices – smartphones, media players and other handhelds – is their computing power, which surpasses desktop computers of the recent past. Yet as com- puter replacements they are problematic,
22 Leadership
with small screens, no physical keyboards, and no precision pointing devices. Their real potential, we believe, arises from the cluster of digital practices that have emerged around these devices. As mobile devices become increasingly
pervasive among youth, the gap between students with and without access to personal computers at home may soon be replaced by a new digital divide: between one set of in- formal ways of using those tools that are fa- miliar, personally meaningful, and relevant to their out-of-school lives, and another set of uses in formal instruction contexts that has nothing in common with the first except hardware. Admittedly, learners’ personal forms of
digital activity – texting, social networking, listening to music, watching videos, playing games – can appear quite different from and even oppositional to productive, school- based activity, and to educational uses of the same devices. But we argue for a different perspective, namely that those informal dig-
By Tobin White and Lee Martin
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