Blending Smart Phones into Regular Classroom Learning

Abstract

Classroom teaching and learning is the key component in formal education. How to engage the students in the limited classroom learning with emerging technologies has interested the researchers and practitioners in recent decades. We designed a personalized and web-based vocabulary drill system targeted at the required new words and phrases from the English textbook of the university students, and asked the students to volunteer in doing the drill programs using their own smart phones via wireless network in the classroom for 10 to 20 min in every week’s English class. The quasi experiment in one semester resulted in the significant grade mean increase of the treatment class in vocabulary test, as well as the decrease of the grade mean distance in the regular exams from the treatment class to the control class from statistically significant level to not significant level. Moreover, the fully participating students in the treatment class achieved significantly better grades than the partially participating students in the post regular exam, although the two groups were almost the same in pre regular exam. The present research demonstrates that the students’ smart phones can be easily blended into university classrooms to effectively facilitate the teaching and learning in university classes.