Apples to the students....

The future of teaching is slowing changing and for this Houston Community College course, it's already here. Lifang Tien, a biology professor, and Roger Boston, who teaches computer science and business technology, received $100,196 from a fund created by HCC Chancellor Mary Spangler to encourage innovation, then used the money to buy phones and pay the monthly bills. The students have to give the phones back by the end of the semester.

I find this to be extremely exciting and I'm very interested to see how it pans out for overall teaching. I always felt that, laptops although as helpful as they are, can be quite a hassle with and a pain to lug around. I love how small and compact the apple iphones are. They have all the features and capabilities of a laptop, without the bulk and hassle. Which just makes one less thing for students to carry around from class to class.

I was just at a conference last weekend, and I became a bit frustrated at how distracting some of the laptops were. Could those distractions be minimized by something smaller? I'm not sure, but I would love to find out. I'm not even going to get into that opening sound that the computer makes when it's turned on for the first time. We all know that sound!!!

Take a moment and just think how you could incorporate the apple iphone into your teaching. Do you think it would be a wise idea to move in this direction for teachers, and for students? I love all versatility of it, and hopefully we'll have more data that will guide us, one way or the other.

Here's the story from the Houston chronicle for more info.