Q:  In my middle school/high school, kids aren’t allowed to use cell phones during the day (although we all know they do).  To “set a good example,” our principal has decided that teachers shouldn’t use them either.

Frankly, most of us consider this a ridiculous ruling.  Phones are available for teacher use in the faculty room or the office, but it’s much more convenient to call a parent, for example, on a cell phone from your own classroom.  And I’ll admit that it’s also more convenient to make appointments or take care of all the other business everyone has to contend with.  How can I convince my principal to move into the age of technology?

A:  You might refer your principal to a survey done by the Pew Research Center last spring.  The survey found that 75% of kids age 12-17 own cell phones.  Twenty-four percent say their schools ban cell phones, but 65% bring them to school anyway and 58% admit to texting in class!

No. They can't. There is no legal floodwall even remotely big enough to stop this one.  

Yet, we keep trying ... and causing ourselves even more policy trouble in the effort because as we are trying to build the wall higher and stronger we are also trying to bail out the water already on the other side. 

Is it time to switch tactics yet? Is it time to go with the flow and help direct the waters in responsible directions? We legal types are the ones that need to let administrators know when it is appropriate to stop trying to plug the dam. That is our responsibility as their advisors. 

Meanwhile, the kids are waiting for us ...

Tip #1 – Set up your cell phone to use the language you’d like to study. – Go to the menu, find settings, locate language and change it to Spanish, Chinese, whatever you would like to learn. If you ever get stuck you can go and change it back.

Tip #2 – Take a look at the buttons you normally push and begin associating those items with the new vocabulary. – This is a great way to master simple words and phrases with little or no effort. For example, each time you open up your cell phone you’ll see, (in the case of Spanish), “mensajes” instead of “messages”, “juegos” instead of “games” and “llamdadas hechas” instead of “calls made.”

These words begin to stick once you see them again and again. Before you know it you’ll recognize the Spanish word just as quickly as the English one.

Tip # 3 – When you have downtime, take out your cell phone and start hitting buttons. – You’ll be surprised at all the vocabulary you can learn by just playing with the different menu items. Some things you’ll recognize immediately and others you’ll be able to guess just by where you find them.

As you probably know, the more contact you have with the language the better. That is particularly true of vocabulary. Seeing a word for the first time and then not seeing it again is a recipe for a very limited vocabulary. You have to get the repetitions needed to help move the information into long term memory.

You also need to see things in context. With a cell phone, you begin to see relationships between words of the same category. For example, the category “llamadas” is “calls” in English.

What is more disruptive, banning cell phones and requiring teachers to confiscate them, or embracing student cell phones and teaching students how to use them more responsibly. For the 2009-2010 school year we changed our cell phone policy at the school were I serve as an assistant principal. We allow students to use their cell phones in between classes and in the cafeteria during their lunch period. The rest of the school day is instructional time and their cell phones are to be off and out of site unless a teacher is using them as part of the lesson.

 

Additionally, we made another change to our cell phone policy. We no longer require teachers to confiscate a student's cell phone if they violate the policy. We tell the teachers to write up a conduct report and turn it in to the main office and we will handle it from there. Our goal was to eliminate the classroom struggle that ensues between the teacher and a student when there is a cell phone policy violation.

 

The school I work in is a high school with about 1050 students. It is a middle to upper-middle class neighborhood. Almost all of our students carry a cell phone and an iPod of some sort.

Overall we have not had an increase in cell phone policy violations versus the same time last year when we did not allow cell phones to be used during the school day. In all honesty the students treated the change in the policy like it was no big deal. Many students have told me that by allowing them to use their phones it has removed the temptation to take them out at other times when it would be inappropriate. 

In all honesty I expected the violations for this school year (09-10) to be higher. One of the reasons I expected higher numbers was because teachers do not have to confiscate the student's cell phone when the student violates the policy. I thought this change in procedure would result in more discipline reports. Not the case.

Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project reports the following:

12% of all students say they can have their cellphones at school at any time.

62% of all students say they can have their cellphones in school, just not in class.

24% of teenagers attend schools that ban all cellphones from school grounds.
• 65% of cellphone-owning teenagers at schools that completely ban phones bring their phones to school every day.
• 58% of cellphone-owning teenagers at schools that ban phones have sent a text message during class.

Collegiate High School Principal Tracie Rodriguez said the science and English departments use texting the most with class assignments. Teachers can choose whether they want students to text them. The trend began with a student asking if it would be OK for them to text their teacher, she said.

She said at one time students were coming to class with incomplete assignments and texting was a way for the students to feel comfortable with getting in touch with teachers outside of class, she said.

The school does still enforce a rule that cell phones can’t be used in class unless approved beforehand as part of a class assignment or in an emergency, she said.

In addition, parents haven’t expressed concerns about their student’s cell phone bills or texting charges, she said.

I observed a lesson the other day in a Spanish 2 class. The lesson dealt with using the imperfect tense i.e. describing activities that one used to do in the past. Each student first had to pick two slips of paper - one with an activity on it, the other with a classmate's name on it. They then had to draw a picture of the classmate doing the activity. Using their cell phone, the students then called into the teacher's Google Voice account and described what the classmate used to do using the imperfect tense. The students, a few at a time, went out into the hallway to place the calls. Afterwards they turned in their drawings which the teacher numbered. While the students were drawing their pictures the teacher had Spanish music videos playing through her LCD projector on the front screen. The songs contained vocabulary words the students were currently learning and primarily used the imperfect tense. The next day in class the teacher played each call to the class. The students had to listen to the call and decide which picture the call was describing. If they guessed correctly the student then had to further add to the description using another original sentence in either the imperfect or the preterite, which they had studied earlier in the year. Correct answers were tallied and winners received homework passes. During day one of the lesson I asked the teacher how she would have done the audio recordings without the cell phones and she responded by saying she would not have been able to do the lesson. After thinking for a while she said she could have used digital recorders but would have had to download each file from the recorders in order to play them back to the students, which would have made it a much more time consuming process.

Charles Costello has been an English Teacher at Greenwich High School (Greenwich, CT) since 2002. On his blog Teacher Talk he wrote an article about whether or not students should have cell phones in class. Below is an excerpt from his blog post:

So what should be done? Well, I have my opinion. No cell phones or any other electronic devices allowed in school. If you’re caught with one, it should be confiscated and appropriate punishment should follow. Whether that means detention or suspension or something else, we can figure that out once we have the courage to ban these devices and show our students that we expect more from them. My classroom policy is that I deduct 10 points from a student’s quarter participation grade each time I see or hear a cell phone or IPOD. If they bring it to school, it must be concealed and turned off before they enter my classroom. 

Mr. Costello takes a rather strong stand against the use of cell phones in school. I can understand his frustration as a classroom teacher but I wonder what else is going on at this school that causes cell phones to be such a disruption. Even if students are allowed to have cell phones in school, there must be policies for how and when they can be used. Additionally, the policies need to be enforced when students violate them.

We allow students to use cell phones between classes and in lunch period. At all other times the cell phones must be off and out of sight, unless a teacher is using the phones as part of a lesson. If a student violates the policy we issue them a central detention. If the problem persists with a particular student we will issue increase the severity of the consequence for each offense i.e. an extended detention, call home, confiscate the phone until a parent retrieves it, and even in-school suspension. On a few occasions we have told a student and their parents that the student is no longer allowed to bring a cell phone to school. At the school were I work the overwhelming majority of students use their cell phones in a responsible manner and they comply with our policy.

Follow this link to read a debate on whether or not cell phones should be allowed in school. They present an article on both sides of the issue and allow you to vote. Below are the results of the vote as of May 9, 2010 at 11:30am.

Via: Cell Phones

The Innovative Educator has put together a well written lesson plan for using cell phones to prepare middle school students for standardized tests. Below is a snippet from the website:

Another in the Innovative Educator's "Cells in Ed Lesson Series." This lesson is designed for science teachers who are interested in harnessing the power of cell phones in instruction to prepare for a standardized test and was used in a class where the teacher allowed students to bring cell phones to class.

via Liz Kolb

 Teachers are finding interesting and creative ways to include mobile phones in classroom instruction in an effort to bridge the divide between the technologies children use at home and what they use in school, education technology experts say.

This article in the NY Times provides a great overview about the use of cell phones in school. The article is laid out like a lesson plan. It provides activities and questions to be used with your students to educate them on how cell phones can be used in a school setting.

This NY Times article talks about how important the basic cellphone in countries besides the United States. The article states:

A recent report by the World Economic Forum and Insead, the French business school, concluded that Americans rank below 71 other nations in their level of cellphone penetration, even though they lead in other areas of connectivity. Some Americans are not connected at all. Millions of others are beyond the phone, so to speak: though they own one and use it, they also own other devices, and the phone is not be-all-end-all.

But it is from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa — the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. In such places, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology. The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, an intergovernmental organization. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

And because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier of global innovation.

As I read the article I couldn't help but think how the lack of funds and infrastructure has forced these other countries to be more creative in utilizing cellular technology for the greater good. The basic cell phone is a powerful tool if one knows how to use it.

I believe as funds continue to dry up for local school districts they will be forced to think outside the box and this will lead them to embrace student-owned cell phones. The acceptance of cell phones in school will further be accelerated by lower cell phone costs as cellular plans and handsets continue to decrease.

Based on a survey and focus groups conducted with teenagers between 12 and 17, Pew found that text messaging is by far the most common way that kids communicate with each other, more than chatting on the phone, e-mailing, using social-networking sites, or talking face to face.

More than 75 percent of teens now own cell phones, notes Pew, up from just 45 percent in 2004. Around 72 percent of all teens, or 88 percent of teens who own mobile phones, use text messages to communicate. That marks a big jump from 2006 when only 51 percent of teens texted on their phones.

Teachers aren't wild about the use of cell phones either, and as a result, many schools limit or ban their use. Around 24 percent of teens said their school bans all cell phones from the campus entirely, while 62 percent said they're allowed to bring a phone to school but not into the classroom.

But 65 percent of teens whose schools exclude cell phones from campus said they bring them anyway, and 58 percent of them said they've sent text messages in class despite the ban. Meanwhile, kids have come up with ways to avoid having their phones taken away. One teen surveyed said he has a real phone and a fake phone so that if the teacher catches him, he can give her the fake phone.

This research underscores what I have been saying for the past year. Students love their cell phones and regardless of the prohibitions schools put on their phones they are using them anyway during the school day. Schools need to accept this reality and start embracing student cell phones and using them as part of the instructional activities.

Prince George's County (Maryland) public schools is proposing a ban on student cell phones. The superintendent for the district does not support the ban. Below are quotes from an article in the Gazette.Net online newspaper:

"Students operate at 100 miles an hour outside of school, but once they get to school they slow down because of [rules] we impose," he said Friday at Discovery Education's Administrator Day, in Silver Spring.

Hite served as the keynote speaker for Discovery Education's — a division of the Discovery Communications media company — first administrator-only training event, which focused on education technology strategies and curriculum. More than 100 administrators from 16 regional school districts attended the free event.

Hite, referring to cell phones as "mini-computers," said phones and iPod digital music players could be used as learning tools.

Hite hopes to persuade the county school board to hold off on putting the ban in place.He feels that student cell phones should only be used to support instructional activities otherwise they should be put away. Hite used to work in Henrico County School in Virginia that was an early 1:1 laptop school district. He says he has seen the benefits technology brings to education.