Cell Phones in the Classroom

I am a gadget guru.  I love everything electronic, and after selecting the perfect digital camera, I get most excited to find the latest, greatest cell phone.   I believe cell phones have an enormous propensity to innovate lives.  From the obvious making an emergency call when away from home, to finding directions when you are lost, capturing breaking news action, translating a foreign word and recording your daily caloric intake, there is no end to how cell phones can make life easier.  I also believe that this same technology can make a huge impact in the classroom.   However, as much of a cheerleader as I am for cell phones in education, I do agree with several of the concerns shared by other educators, particularly those cited on helium.com.

The biggest problem many feel come with allowing cell phones in the classroom is the distraction that they pose.  To an extent, I concur with this statement.  Whenever students are caught with cell phones in our school, 85% of the time they are either checking their Facebook or Twitter account, or texting a friend.  We hear this from teachers time and again.  They were in the middle of a lesson and posed a question to the class when one or two students were so totaly engrossed in looking at their phones that they were completely disengaged from the topic at hand.  They weren’t taking notes or looking up a word the teacher used, they were in another place entirely.   For this reason, I disagree with Jennifer Koishal when she stated on Helium.com that cell phones were only considered distractions “by the lecturing teachers or more appropriately, were more of ‘annoyance’ for the teachers” versus the phones really being a true hindrance.   Sometimes students completely misuse their phones is class.  What would be the purpose of playing Fun Run during an algebra lesson?

For the most part, though, I agree with the “yes” side of the debate.  There are so many possibilities for their use.  Just last week I tweeted to my Film students that the first to tweet back tomorrow’s Driving Question would get their first pick of ingredients for the upcoming project.  This created a great buzz amongst the students, and based on their responses, it was obvious they got the point of the lesson.  As for the Helium survey, it was interesting to note that many of the “no’s” were from Elementary school teachers.  Their arguments did make a lot of sense, particularly for that age group.  My favorite comment was from one educator who said that students are still learning to write correctly, therefore how will the texting language help them at this point in their progress? 

At the other end of the spectrum, the YouTube video, “The Epic School Project” was very pro cell phones in the classroom, though the students they were referencing were college-aged.   The video stated that “students are in charge of their own learning,” and they will have to figure out how to take advantage (and not be distracted) by the tool.  Again, these are older, even adult students.  I think in high school, students need to be educated on the correct use of cell phones in the classroom; we can’t just assume they know the proper etiquette.  As many of the top educators claimed in the “Impact of Mobile Devices on K12 Education,” whether we see the value or not of cell phones in the classroom, these tools are here to stay and we would be wise to proactively write them into the curriculum.