INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY WITH PEDAGOGY IN THE CLASSROOM THROUGH THE SMART PHONE: A CONTENT ANALYSIS

Abstract

Technology has become the by-word in education, in fact, it has permeated all facets of life to the extent that

ignoring it in the classroom may result in products that are not fit for the global village. Most countries in Africa

and globally, acknowledge that they cannot provide a 1:1 learner computer ratio. However, learners in the same

locality especially in the urban and peri-urban own smart phones which are powerful hand-held computers. This

research set out to find out what other countries in Africa and elsewhere have done so far in terms of integrating

pedagogy with technology through the use of the smart phone in the classroom using content analysis method.

The researcher looked at some countries in parts of Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe and the United States of

America. This corpus-based descriptive study followed a five step process of qualitative data treatment: (i) col

lection of related data (ii) organization of data (iii) data coding (iv) identifying themes (vi) interpreting the data.

The findings of the study suggested that African countries have poverty and inconsistent internet as challenges

in integration in education. Increased advancement towards technology integrated learning in their education

systems may be speeded up by incorporating the smart phone. This is so as to combat the need for computer

hardware and connectivity.