Are we ready to engage students with our own mobile devices?

Nowadays, mobile technology becomes the most penetrating innovation in this information generation. Students and teachers are exposed with fascinating and powerful mobile devices in everyday life. With the advanced technology development and high connectivity to the Internet through wireless networks in school, it becomes common that students and teachers are bringing their own mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablet computers, and laptop computers) to classroom for both personal, teaching, and learning purposes. However, it has been challenging for teachers to engage their students in classroom teaching when students bring their mobile devices to class as a distraction. How could we take the advantage of this mobile technology for our classroom teaching and learning, and enhance the student engagement in our classroom instructions? In this paper, we will share a personal insight on how to engage students with mobile technologies in our classroom instruction. A new pedagogical framework of “Bring Your Own Devices” (BYOD) will be introduced targeting on a general classroom teaching environment, and varieties of existing mobile collaborative learning platforms will be explored. Then, a first-hand teaching experience and pilot experiment with BYOD framework will be discussed and shared, and help teachers understand how to prepare themselves, the students, and the system infrastructure for this innovative instructional framework. Finally, our future research direction will be presented in this paper.