Hold the Phone! High School Students' Perceptions of Mobile Phone Integration in the Classroom.

When mobile phones first appeared in the classroom in the 1990s, they were perceived by teachers as classroom disruptors and banned by schools. In the ensuing decades, mobile phones have evolved until they can perform most of the tasks performed by a desktop computer, and do so from almost anywhere. In 2012, UNESCO asserted that mobile devices, because of their ubiquity and portability, were positioned to influence teaching and learning in a way personal computers never did (p. 14). Ninety percent of American adults own a mobile phone (Pew Internet Research, 2014,) and almost two-thirds are now smartphone owners (Lenhart, 2015). Seventy-eight percent of teens own a mobile phone (Madden, Lenhart, Duggan, Cortesi, & Gasser, 2013), and nearly three-quarters own or have access to a smartphone (Len- hart, 2015). Access to mobile phones is seen as a way to provide teachers and students with a wide range of benefits that are associated with mobile learning (M-learning) including:(a) offering students multiple entry points and learning paths and allowing for differentiated learning; (b) enabling multiple modality via mobile devices by which students have a tool to create a different learning artifact to suit their needs; (c) supporting student improvisation in situ, student may improvise as needed within the context of learning (e.g., take pictures to illustrate learning connections); and (d) supporting learning creation on the move with an ease of creating and sharing artifacts. (Liu, Scordino, Renata, Navarrete, Yujung, & Lim, 2015, p. 356)In addition to providing teachers and students with these benefits, the pervasiveness of mobile phones can assist schools in addressing both the traditional and new digital divide. Traditionally, low SES and minority students have had less access to technology than their more affluent, White classmates; however, research indicates that poor and minority individuals have been reducing this traditional digital divide by accessing the Internet via their mobile phones (Lenhart, 2015). A new digital divide has emerged, however, between the low levels of access schools have to technologies in comparison to students' access outside of school. By allowing students to use personal mobile phones, schools can potentially reduce this divide.The benefits claimed for mobile phones in the classroom have caused an increasing number of schools to remove long-standing bans on using them. Some schools have adopted a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, but the classroom distractions and disruptions that originally prompted banning their use in the classroom still exist. In one study, for example, 72% of students indicated that their phones rang during class (Burns & Lohenry, 2010), and 85% of students in another study admitted to texting during class (McCoy, 2013).As schools move toward BYOD integration, school stakeholders must continue to weigh the benefits of mobile phones against the potential costs. Students' perceptions of integration and the benefits and barriers associated with mobile phones in the classroom should play a part in this cost/benefit analysis. Knowing what specific advantages and disadvantages students see for mobile phones as learning tools could assist schools in deciding appropriate policies and teachers in determining appropriate instructional practices for integrating phones into the classroom. Although there is a growing body of research regarding the perceptions of millennials on the integration of mobile phones in the post-secondary classroom, there is a gap in the literature regarding high school students' perceptions of the benefits and barriers associated with allowing phones in class.Purpose of the StudyThe purpose of this descriptive study was to examine perceptions about mlearning from high school students in one urban district. The specific research questions that guided the study are as follows:(1 ) How supportive are high school students of using mobile phones in the classroom? …