When you plan (or have) to use smart phones in class you are dealing with a relatively small viewing area. Asking students to read articles or PDFs can be quite awkward and counter productive with the students scrolling up and down and pushing the screen from side to side. However, there is one type of reading exercise that can be done effectively on most smart phones: get students to guess what the next chunk of a sentence is going to be.
From: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1507/150709-recycling-sq.htm
Every time the student guesses correctly, the selected text joins on the end of the paragraph. If they select wrongly then their percentage drops. The students are engaged in completing the text as they want to be the first to finish – a helpful dash of gaming! I usually tell students to hit the restart button once they make a wrong choice.
For English as a foreign language teachers, an excellent source of these exercises is BreakingEnglishNews.com. There are hundreds of lessons that include this type of exercise that span all sorts of topics at low to high levels of English.
If you want to create your own you’ll have to buy the software from: http://www.cict.co.uk/textoys/sequitur.php Note – this is a free plug, as I don’t have any connection with the company that sells it – just admiration for a tool that has lasted for a long time as a top tool for eLearning.
To find out how to quickly get the students to access the website on smart phones, see my article here: SmartPhones
