Cell phones in school? For news?

Over the holidays, the BBC reported that London middle school students are taking part in a BBC project that brings journalism into the classroom. The 8th graders researched local news in daily newspapers and websites, collected interview information with their cell phones’ mp3 recording capabilities, and took photographs with camera phones. Once they had gathered all of their source material, they used technology available in their classrooms to write broadcast reports on deadline and record audio/video the files (mpeg4) for placement on a BBC-affiliated website, School Report.

Thabo, 12, said: “Normally in class, we record information in writing. Today, we wrote scripts and used technology, so it was a good balance.”

BBC News Interactive journalist, Lucie Mclean, who specialises in mobile phones, added: “Using phones meant students could gather news quickly as they were already familiar with the technology.”

While cell phones often don’t have a place in schools – for instance, the New York City public school system has banned them completely from school property – they are a powerful technology for collecting and sharing current information and a vital tool in many professions from journalism to business to medicine. The BBC project seems to understand this notion of phone-as-tool much better than New York City does. Since kids already know something about the social aspects of cell phones, why not teach them how to use the technology as a tool for learning new information and transforming it into something that many people might find interesting or useful? You can easily imagine kids using those skills later in life.

Even further, why not encourage kids to reach more deeply into community happenings? It seems to me that a project like this could become even more powerful if kids continued with it for more than one day and were encouraged to become expert in topics of their interest – something like our Journalism.net and South Madison Times players have done in their time as journalists. Would kids begin to dig into events or people or places that they currently just accept as parts of their lives? Find history or science or art in community happenings? Hopefully we’ll be able to get a better sense of that transformation in the future Neighborhood.net project – I’m excited to see where a project like this might go when it’s given more time to develop.