Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple recently released a new iPhone (#sarcasm). This is a good time to remind you of an often untapped source of digital devices for your classroom. Ask your students’ parents to donate their old phones to your classroom when they upgrade their mobile phonphonees. You will probably find that most of those phones can at the very least be used for taking pictures to be used in multimedia projects. The odds are also good that most of the phones you collect now will have some type of web browser.

Tips for gathering and using old mobile phones in your classroom:
1. Ask parents to donate their old phones. Send out the request on your blog or classroom newsletter.
2. Put a donation box in your school’s main office or library to make it easy for parents to drop-off donations.
3. Make sure you tell parents to clear all personal data from their phones before making the donation.
4. Communicate with your IT department to make sure that you can connect the donated devices to your school’s network. Even if you have permissions for adding devices to your school’s network, it is a good idea to check with IT to make sure your network can support an influx of new devices connecting to it.
5. Use the cameras on the donated devices to create B-roll image and video galleries.