Personal Smartphones in Primary School: Devices for a PLE?

This paper describes the goals and first results of an ongoing two year case study in a European primary school (5th primary class) where the teacher and all students were equipped with a personal smartphone. Students are allowed to use phone and internet services at no charge and to take home their smartphones after school. In this project the students have access to an internet connected computing device which can be used for reading, writing, calculating, drawing, taking photos, listening or recording audio, and communicating. Does this setting help to achieve the goals of the official school curriculum? How do personal smartphones in primary school influence teaching and learning, especially weekly planning (“Wochenplanunterricht”) and learning outside school? The paper describes the planning and introduction phase of the project as well as first best practice examples of using personal smartphones in and out of school after five months of use. The authors provide qualitative data from questionnaires with students and parents and quantitative data of phone and internet use. To date the results help to formulate specific research questions for further research and they encourage enlarging the case study to several classes in the near future.