Classroom III

I think I have only two students that do not have cellular devices, a.k.a. cell phones, this year. They all know about how to cheat on their tests using SMS, or what us teachers call text messaging. I mentioned to one of my fellow teachers that the cell phones they have are more powerful than the eight year old dinosaur/paper weight computers we have them reading on and watching videos. They are not impressed with our old school tech toys.

When I asked my students if they knew about Google SMS, none of them had heard about it. Personalized SMS saves time by saving your location. Google automatically saves your most frequently used location for future queries. You can also text ’set location’ followed by a city & state or zip to save a new location. Then with a few key strokes, the user can Google the phone number of the local pizza place, access weather forecasts, find out what it playing in movie theater 40 miles away, look up directions to the drivers license office, and look up definitions to words on their text that they should have been learning in class when you were trying to lecture them on the structure and function of endoplasmic reticulum. The all know that if they type in the words “define zenith”, it will look like this on their cellular device:

In the unlikely chance that you are reading this on your cellular device, here is the link: mobile.google.com for you to start using this if you have not already mastered the art of Googling on your cell phone. I mentioned using Google to one of our district administrators. The response was honest and short- “I need to have my son teach me about that”. I just smiled and replied- I am still not going to learn how to set my VCR and I refuse to learn how to check messages on my home phone. If they want to talk to me, keep trying or send me an email. On second thought, if it is really important, I want to talk face to face. Send me a video message. Oh, but you can’t because my cellular device is an old cell phone and I do not know how to use anything on it myself except the address book and how to dial a number.

Technology- can’t believe how fast it is changing. It is a real challenge to keep current– I try.