Reflection 5.6.4 The potential of social media as a communication tool for learning.

      Access to mobile telephony is not yet universal in my school. Access to smartphones remains low, although this may change as some parents can afford to buy it for their children.

      The lack of awareness among my fellow teachers about the positive educational value that mobile phones and social media can add, and a generalized conservatism toward the use of mobile phones by my young learners at school, also serves as an inhibiting factor.

      Students/ juveniles are fond of using their mobile phones to send ‘bullying’ messages to other students, cheat on tests using SMS messaging, and access pornographic materials and sex chat rooms. These reasons are likely to influence my fellow teachers’ perceptions of mobile phone use by their students and have led many educators at my school to support the banning of mobile phones from schools.

      Mobile learning and use of social media in learning has not yet been institutionalized or mainstreamed within the Ugandan national teacher development systems.

      At the University level, mobile phones and use of social media are not integrated into teacher education programs offered by teacher-training institutions. So teachers take it as a gimmick in the school society.

      Mobile learning is also not incorporated into subsequent phases of teacher development for in-service teachers at my school. Presently, the inclusion of mobile phones in teacher training and development depends solely on project-based interventions like CCTI (Commonwealth Certificate for Technology Integration) or the ingenuity of individual teachers.

Learners need to be sensitized about digital citizenship because they all attest that pornography-nude pictures and nasty information is everywhere on the Internet and that they even share it.

§  They need to be sensitized about digital foot print and the illegal behavior they indulge in without their consent for example plagiarism.

My learners do not site more societal dangers of face-book and twitter but rather they mention their own hardships from those platforms like: Delay to do homework, spending all their little off-pocket for buying Internet bundles, and addiction to Internet usage vis a vis other daily chores.

     There is a need to combat conservatism among my fellow teachers about technology in general, the use of social media and mobile phones in particular by students at school.

§   Projects like SEMA in Kenya with the cascade model can be adapted; it relies on newly trained teachers like me to support and train their colleagues to integrate mobile phones into their teaching.

§  Policies should be put or developed by the ministry of education or the National Curriculum Development Center in Uganda to include clear guidelines on the use of mobile learning for teachers, including acceptable use policies accompanied by working practices that demonstrate how such policies might be implemented in support of mobile learning in schools and use of social media by learners and teachers at school.

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