A cellphone industry trade group is trying to sell schools on the educational benefits of smartphones in the classroom, and it's bringing some research of questionable independence to back up its claims. Qualcomm (which makes cellphone chips) paid for a study in a North Carolina school wherein 9th and 10th graders used smartphones in math classes:"The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25 percent better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes."When I was in high school, the TI-86 was our workhorse in math classes and I'm sure it helped me better understand certain concepts in calculus. And the practice I got writing simple programs for the TI-86 helped later in college in computer science and some branches of analytic philosophy.But the technology was only useful in math and the hard sciences and it's hard for me to see how a device which can also make phone calls would really improve on a good graphing calculator. What do you think? Do smartphones have smart uses in school?
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