Keith McAnear, Smylie Wilson Middle School, Lubbock, TX
When Texting In Class Is a Good Thing

The NEA Foundation created its Challenge to Innovate (C2i) to discover innovative approaches in teaching and to enable educators to share and build on these ideas to improve student learning. Find out how C2i Mobile Project national awardee Keith McAnear is using mobile phone technology to change the way his students learn.

To introduce the concept of summarization to his seventh grade students, Keith McAnear compared it to texting. “If you are texting to your friend what happened at the mall or what ‘so-and-so’ wore to school,” he explained, “you do not recount every intricate detail, you summarize. Within the summary there is a mention of what happened in the beginning, middle and end (BME).”

To keep his students’ attention, McAnear decided to incorporate texting into a reading assignment. Students texted a summary of a passage to a classmate who translated it into grammatically correct English, and forwarded it back. The original author then reviewed it and sent it to the teacher.

“This idea successfully taps into the interests, the elusive motivations and attitudes of adolescents. They now see learning as a process that is in their control that meets them in the world in which they live,” McAnear said. “Just as their cell phone is an extension of their mind and will, so is learning when experienced through this medium.”

He believes that in addition to enjoying this exercise, his students are learning in a new way. “According to test results, my students performed especially well on questions dealing with summary and main idea,” he said. “Though we have not received official scores for the state writing test, formative assessments and essay assignments indicate marked improvements compared to years prior as well as the diagnostic essay assignment administered at the beginning of the year.”

His ultimate goal is to help students realize that learning takes place outside of the classroom and that they have the power to control their own learning processes in their own unique ways.

“Students often perceive themselves going to school, attending class, but rarely do they recognize that school takes place inside of them.”