Students in Mrs. Samantha Leone‘s calculus class at Nashua North are using smartphones as a useful tool in the classroom.

At first, most would argue that encouraging phone use is distracting, but it has in fact increased participation and excitement about learning. Students have downloaded apps such as "NearPod" and "Kahoot!" which are both interactive learning programs that engage all students in the classroom.

With NearPod, an instructor can give a presentation using the app and students can follow along on their personal devices. Many students find this helpful because it’s interactive and teachers can include fun activities such as drawings or graphs related to the subject at hand.

Teachers can even add polls or quizzes to assess the class’s progress as a whole and draw conclusions from the students’ responses. The data is collected and summarized for the teacher to view.

Kahoot is a trivia app in which educational questions are created by the instructor and students race to solve and submit the correct answer. It also keeps track of each student’s score, and the competitiveness gets the entire class focused.

"I think the use of technology is very helpful, because I always have my phone with me, and I like watching the presentation and doing the checkpoint quizzes," said senior Jacob Dubien. "I find that I enjoy it a lot more than taking notes. The trivia games especially help because you are more inclined to pay attention and understand the math so that you can beat your friends’ scores."

Students sign into the apps with a username. The activity on their smartphones is monitored. If at any time a student exits the app during the instruction, the teacher will receive a notification of who left. This is to ensure that everyone is using their phone for the educational purpose and that they don’t get distracted by another app.

Mrs. Leone’s classroom also has a smartboard, which is useful for creating graphs and tables for math classes. She takes notes on the board and can save them as a PDF and upload them to her website for students to view later. This is especially helpful when students are absent and they need to get the notes they missed.

The use of interactive apps has shown a significant increase of enthusiasm in the students’ attitudes about learning. Some students have trouble grasping difficult concepts when everything is based off notes and textbook reading. It’s important to cater to different learning styles and introduce new ways of learning material to break routine and get students excited about learning.

Emily Sanford is a senior at Nashua High School North.