Cell Phone Becomes Teacher’s Pet

When cellphones began to spread among teenagers in the late 1990s, it became something of a teacher’s nightmare, and nowhere more so than in rules-oriented Japan. Mobile phones were immediately banned, but students’ enthusiasm could not be contained: phones went off in the middle of classes, students relayed emails to friends all day long, and cheating using the phone during exams became pervasive. But recently, there has been a change of heart among some Japanese educators. In fact, some teachers at universities and high schools are requiring that their pupils show up in class with a mobile phone. 

Students of Keizo Nagaoka, a professor at Waseda University’s campus in Tokorozawa, near Tokyo, are asked to bring their Internet-enabled cellphones to the classroom to respond to questions posed via an interactive computer system that displays the results on the phone’s screen. “In my lectures on remote learning, I will ask students, for example, ‘What kind of teachers’ skills will be important in a remote-learning environment?’ ” said Nagaoka, who teaches education classes. Full story Here.