Keeping teens on their toes with BYOD

The big deal with teaching teens is their attention span. You can blame the advent of digital technology, you can blame their genes, you can even blame the US President-elect. The fact is, if you don’t keep the pace of lessons lively and keep the activity types varied, teenagers’ eyes glaze over.

After affairs of the heart, the biggest classroom distraction is students’ phones. Phones are the bane of every classroom and the cause of by far the most complaints in staffrooms. But while schools try to ban them, the digital revolution ploughs on undeterred. The fact is, digital is here to stay. It’s a part of everyday life, a necessity the same as running water and electric light. A study commissioned by Nokia1 three years ago found that people checked their smartphones about 150 times during a 16-hour day. In a US study2, 90% of teens said they had access to a smartphone and 24% said they used theirs constantly.

Banning devices in class is ultimately counterproductive. Rather than getting students to focus, it often seems to make students twitchy because they’re so desperate to get their hands on their device. A 2016 survey of 18–24 year olds in the UK3 found that nearly half of them check their phone at least once every 15 minutes, and one in five people suffer from separation anxiety when they are away from their phone. This is a battle that schools and teachers cannot win.

Why Bring Your Own Device?

My interest in using mobiles and tablets began when I was teaching at a language school in Oxford, UK. I was trying to provide the variety and pace that teens need using games, plenty of personalised activities, video viewed on my laptop, dogme, unplugged, flipped, you name it: I tried anything and everything I could think of to keep the classes lively. It was exhausting. I realised that I was going to run myself ragged if I couldn’t use digital in my classroom as well. It was time to drag my ageing 1990s CELTA methodology into the 21st century.

But my classroom had no interactive whiteboard – it didn’t even have Wi-fi. If I wanted to bring an important aspect of students’ lives – their digital lives – into the language classroom, I was going to have to Do It Myself. And my students would have to help me, using the devices they already had in their pockets or bags.

When I first started my experiments in DIY digital in 2013, around 60% of students in a typical class had a smartphone in their pocket. Three years later, in nearly every class I teach, every student has a smartphone with them. And there’s never a shortage of volunteers to share with those that don’t.

Establish ground rules

It goes without saying that you cannot teach in a classroom where teenage students have unfettered access to their phones. They need to get them out for specific short tasks and then put them away again, otherwise chaos ensues. Before we run through simple ways you can use BYOD in your classroom, let’s look at some ground rules.

If devices are banned in class, or banned completely from school premises, you have two problems.

1. You need to convince your head teacher or director of studies that devices have a valid pedagogical role. If there is resistance in your school to allowing phones and tablets, the rest of this article should give you plenty of ammunition as to why they are a teacher’s friend.
2. You need to agree an ‘acceptable use’ policy with your students.

It’s best to discuss and agree with students a set of rules around when they can and can’t use their phones in class. Their buy-in to this agreement should make it more effective than imposing top-down rules. One of the best ideas I’ve come across for dealing with the interruptions from phones is to allow an official ‘digital break’ during classes. So for example, during a 60-minute lesson, you might pause the class every 15 minutes and allow students to take their devices out so they can check in, update, like, follow, and so on. This need be nothing related to the lesson: it is a mini-break. Give students a time limit of say 90 seconds. You don’t even need to time the break yourself. Get a student to set a timer on their phone and they tell everyone when the time is up. This hands control to students. After that, their phones have to be off or switched to silent or airplane mode, and placed in a box in the middle of the table or at the front of desks, depending on the layout of your classroom.

Getting started

For BYOD newbies, a great place to get started is with this lesson warmer. It’s an adaptation of the standard ‘Find someone who’ activity. It requires no preparation, it doesn’t require connectivity, and it works with smartphones as well as older ‘feature’ phones.

Ask students to take out their phones and ‘Find someone who has …’ the same number of apps / six of the same apps / five of the same games / a photo of the same school friend, and so on. To extend this, you simply need to look at what is on your students’ devices and ask yourself: What can be compared? What will my students be comfortable comparing? What can they say about these features? For example, with their phones on the table students can describe their social media avatar icons to each other, then swap phones and check the accuracy of the descriptions; or explain why they chose them, and so on. Students have fun because the activity is interesting, it personalises, it’s reflective, and it isn’t from a book. For the teacher, it requires no preparation, and doesn’t require students to have Wi-fi or 3G connectivity.

BYOD without the internet

There are dozens of meaningful speaking activities that you can do using the basic functionality of devices. Once you get into the habit, you’ll realise there’s no limit to using the camera/video, maps, clock/timer, and so on, on phones.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, you can use the camera to augment any class. Yet in this hyper-digital age, it never ceases to amaze me how few colleagues ever bother to make use of this wonderful resource that most students have in their pocket. Your students can take photos during the lesson, out of the window or around school to practise descriptions in class. In preparation for the next class, students can take photos or video at home or in the street. Make activities more fun and feel relevant by tapping into phenomena such as selfies, and other memes as they arise. With video, I often find that shy students find it easier to talk to their phone than to a real person. Recording themselves and playing it back can give their confidence a real boost. In pairs and groups, there is endless fun to be had using video: memory games (What was Juan wearing? Who was in the shop?), guessing games (What is Maria going to say / do / buy?), devising short sketches, guessing how the sketch ends, and so on. The more you try it, the more you’ll realise that the possibilities of BYOD offline are infinite.

Getting online in an unconnected classroom

The rest of this article is about BYOD online. If your students have data contracts, they can go online and use apps that require the internet. But if your students don’t have data contracts and there’s no Wi-fi in your school, you still have two options:

1. If you have access to data on your own phone, students can ‘tether’ from your phone. Tethering is when you create a password-protected Wi-fi network from a smartphone. Students who don’t have a data package can get online via your phone’s Wi-fi network. I do this quite often in my classes and have had no problems with up to ten students tethering off my phone while they use online apps and so on.
2. Is there a public Wi-fi network that students can access? Increasingly in cities, there is.

BYOD with social media

There are some cool apps you can buy for self-study, but in my classes I prefer to make use of what already comes bundled on phones. What’s the point in buying something when phones already have everything you need? Most students have a social media app and if they don’t, they can download one quickly and free of charge. You can use Facebook and WhatsApp to create closed groups for each class. Students don’t need to share personal data or be ‘friends’ for this to work. Some teachers use social media groups to set homework and to send reminders (Remember to make a photo diary of your journey to school today!). They can be used by the teacher or by students to send a word/idea of the day. I have used both apps in class for contributing to brainstorms, with small groups of students adding to pooled ideas digitally. Why? It’s quicker and more natural than shouting out and running to the board. Out of class, students can share examples of funny uses of English around town, or curate class sets of photos on weekly topics. Instagram and Pinterest are also great for compiling photo albums, and you can be guided by your students’ superior knowledge of which app best suits your class’s needs.

Remember to get your students to change the language of their phone to English so that the metalanguage of every app is English. Your students will know how.

BYOD with dictionaries and vocabulary apps

Most of my students have translation apps. I guess they have their place, but they have no ‘sense’ filter. The most fun to be had with translation apps is identifying and correcting the silly mistakes! Dictionary.com and Thesaurus. com are instant and free, but they aren’t aimed at leaners of English. The best dictionaries are the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries4. They need Wi-fi, although there are paid-for offline versions.

By far the best vocabulary resource is the English Vocabulary Profile5. Students and teachers can subscribe to the EVP for free, and it works on laptops and tablets. It works on phones too if you have teenage eyes!

On one level it works much like an enhanced ELT dictionary – it has dictionary definitions, example sentences and you can listen to the pronunciation. The EVP also shows word families, so students can see all of the other words related to their search term. The words are all graded A1–C1 and are searchable by:

• part of speech (noun, verb, adjective,adverb, etc.)
• grammar (count, uncount, nouns with no plural form, intransitive, etc.) 
• usage (formal/informal)
• topic (21 categories such as art and media, body and health, describing things, people: actions) 
• prefixes and suffixes.

English Vocabulary Profile is a wonderful resource that students can access at the drop of a hat. Students writing a review of a video game, for example, could search for all verbs in the A1–B2 range relating to Sport and games (33 are listed, including beat, catch, hunt, race, lose, win). Then they could search for adjectives at A2 or B1 for Describing things, and so on. Very soon, they would have a personalised and level-specific topic set to use in their review.

BYOD with other apps

Most teachers have taught the weather, places around town and giving directions. But how many teach these areas using the weather apps or map apps on students’ devices? Why not let the real world into the classroom using up-to-date apps rather than coursebooks? In one memorable class, there was a new Mongolian student. No one had ever met someone from Mongolia or knew anything about the country. Using a map system similar to Google street maps, the student took us along the main streets of Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator). Photos embedded along the route made her commentary come alive and her classmates and I were riveted. Other free apps you shouldn’t overlook:

• Shopping apps like eBay and Amazon bring alive lessons about any number of products, with real prices and real reviews – these are gold dust at any level.
• Train, metro and bus apps are great for talking about the real times and prices of transport.
• Look at free cinema apps for what’s on at the movies. I love the iMDb (Internet Movie Database) app for film reviews by famous critics as well as the general public, and for cast lists and lists of films by genre, year, and so on.
• Find pictures, and have your students find their own, using ELTpics6. Any teacher who has asked their students to go online and find pictures of something will know of the shortcomings of a Google images search. The images are often highly inappropriate or just irrelevant. For teachers looking for images to use in class, it’s hard to find anything on Google of a high enough resolution to use. ELTpics have amassed a library of 25,000 photos on their Flickr site, all relevant to language classrooms and filtered by teachers for teachers. As well as being searchable by tag, the photos are organised into over 100 EFL-relevant sets such as ‘homes’ or ‘things I see every day’ or ‘childhood’. It really is impressive.
• Last but not least, you must get your students to have conversations with the digital personal assistant that comes with their phone or tablet: Siri on iOS, and Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa on Android or Windows. Get students to set the language of their phone to English and they’ll love having quasi conversations with their personal assistants in English.

Challenge yourself

Every time I plan my lessons, I challenge myself to find a way to use BYOD. Not for any gimmicky reason, but because with teenagers it’s a great way of injecting variety and pace. Once you get started with BYOD, you’ll find it easy to envision how your classes can be transformed in fun ways that lead to better learning outcomes – for free and often with zero preparation. The limit is not the technology, which is flexible, up-to-date and attractive. In my experience, the limit is the teacher. So try BYOD: challenge yourself to use your students’ own devices at least once a lesson.

References

1.  ‘Mobile users can’t leave their phone alone for six minutes and check it up to 150 times a day’ in The Daily Mail, 11 February 2013 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276752/
2.  ‘Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015’ by Pew Research Center, 9 April 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/
3. ‘Are YOU addicted to technology?’ in The Daily Mail, 10 May 2016 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3581171
4.  http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/
5.  http://www.englishprofile.org/wordlists
6. http://www.eltpics.com/