USING MOBILE PHONES TO PROMOTE LIFE SKILLS EDUCATION AMONG OPEN SCHOOLING STUDENTS: Promises, Possibilities, and Potential Strategies

Across the globe, life skills education has been usually developed as part of a school
initiative designed to support the healthy psychosocial development of children and
adolescents. In other side, formal education system not always provides young people
with good opportunities to become confident and realize their potentials. In this back
drop, the biggest challenge is to identify the best strategies for providing effective life
skills education to those many children who never attend secondary school or reach an
age of high vulnerability and risk taking behaviour in the years immediately before
reaching secondary school. Considering the situation that in different parts of the
world, majority of the youths is having a mobile or will have a mobile soon, the
researcher is of the view that mobile phones can be a viable option to offer life skills
education to open schooling students coming from different cultural and social settings
and backgrounds. Following this approach, present paper mainly discusses about:
promises offered by mobile phones for life skills education; possibilities for using
mobile phones as an effective, efficient and economical option for offering life skills
education; and potential strategies to offer mobile phones supported life skills
education to open schooling students.