Are Smart Phones a Student’s Best Friend Or Worst Influence?
The debate rages on: Are smartphones clever enough to help your grades? Or are they making college and university students dumber?
The evidence has not changed. Point for smarter: a phone’s tools can be used for good and not evil. It can record your lectures, help you keep a schedule and be more productive. Point for dumber: making information too easily accessible can make students lazy.
So what do the people think?
Angus Reid recently conducted a survey on behalf of the mobile carrier Mobilicity. Their findings show that of 1,001 Canadian adults, 41 per cent of people recognized smartphones’ value for recording lectures and tutorial sessions. Another 46 per cent feel mobile apps are a way of keeping students organized. Another 42 per cent of respondents identified the devices’ capacity as a co-ordination tool for school activities.
Another study called Mobile Student 2.0 showed that 66 per cent of Canadians would use a mobile phone to conduct online research anywhere, anytime. The same survey also found that 42 per cent of Canadian students are coordinating school and social activities on their smartphone. As a whole, 56 per cent of respondents think that mobile phones are an invaluable tool for students.
It seems the country is still split on the issue of whether smart phones are good or bad. Maybe we can all agree that they make the smart student smarter and the dumb student dumber? Maybe not.
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