Background The rapid adoption of modern technology has changed many aspects of our life and communication; it has the power to influence and change the way we teach, learn and practice different types of professions mainly teaching and health care providing. Smartphone applications are increasingly becoming popular and widespread. Generally, these applications are likely to play a significant role in supporting education, in general, and medical education, in particular. This study aims at investigating how medical faculty members are using smartphones in medical education and practice, and how they perceive them as an educational tool at university level. Methods The researchers have distributed an online questionnaire - including three parts: a demographic part with five variables; a 15-item part of various applications of the smartphones; and a 14-item part measuring attitudes towards using these smartphones - among medical faculty members at two Palestinian universities. Setting and participants Medical faculty members working at two Palestinian universities. Data have been collected from 30 participants out of 72 representing a response rate of 41.6%. Results The average skills score with smartphones usage is (3.18) which tells that faculty members use smartphones to support their teaching practices. In general, faculty members are positive towards smartphones as a prospective teaching tool since the average attitude towards using smartphones is (3.60). The study results show no significant differences among faculty members based on the five demographic variables, i.e. university, title, department affiliation, gender, and years of experience. Conclusion It seems that the majority of faculty members believe that smartphones would be a significant instrument as well as addition to their teaching practices. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1697-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This study investigated the cultural values in the NorthStar textbook which has been taught since 2008 at An-Najah University as a compulsory course. To answer the questions of the study, content analysis methodology was used. The study revealed that the frequency of cultural values was higher in some units depending on the main theme of the unit. These frequencies ranged between 22 and 274. The religious value had the lowest frequency, while the social value had the highest frequency. Moreover, it was found that the textbook did not only focus on different values of a foreign culture but it also dealt with different cultures. The content analysis revealed that the most frequent cultural values were related the American culture which indicated an obvious bias towards the foreign cultural values in general and the American cultural values in particular at the expense of the Arab-Islamic culture as no unit talked about Arabs or Muslims except the mentioning of the word "Arab" which was mentioned only once in the textbook and in a way that even displeases the Arabs. In the light of the results, the researchers recommended analyzing and evaluating the content of EFL textbooks of foreign authors to be sure that they do not include cultural values that might go against our Arab-Islamic culture. Therefore, careful attention should be paid to how the others are presented and how to filter the undesirable cultural values that in a textbook. Finally, the researchers called for EFL national curricula at the Palestinian universities.