The War on Cell Phones

Over the course of EDT 211, we've accumulated a substantial amount of evidence that cell phones can be useful tools in classroom, but still there are teachers fighting the war on cell phones. Even in the home, grandparents and parents often gripe about the amount of time kids spend with their devices. Many of their concerns are founded, it can be distracting in the classroom and can lead to being prone to procrastination (I'm big enough to admit I'm guilty of that).

However, these drawbacks are met with pretty huge advantages. Face to face communication might be suffering, but there's always FaceTime and Skype, not to mention phones were first designed for convenient communication. Arguments can be made that many popular apps do nothing for the brain ("but Snapchat has National Geographic and CNN articles!"), but there are as many that are. Additionally, there's more resourceful teachers designing lessons utilizing technology than ever before. One can argue that technology (cell phones included) makes education as a whole more accessible. Have you ever found yourself neck-deep in Wikipedia reading about flamingos and wondering how you got there? Who says we don't learn on our own!

As for those whose primary concern is the distractibility of phones in the classroom, I personally feel there's few ways to prevent them from being used short of an EMP. If anything, the fact that they are distracted may, forgive my wishful thinking here, make older students accountable for how they choose to behave in class? From what I've seen in more casual classrooms, sometimes the students are just happy to have it accessible to them and still pay attention. This isn't always the case, but even before cell phones were in everyone's pockets there were always students who didn't participate as much (the readers, the sleepers, the doodlers, the spit-ballers...must I go on?). Not to mention the potential for a distraction is just as great in a computer lab, and who wants to ban those? No one!

No matter how the Luddites protest, the use of cell phones isn't going to go away anytime soon, so why not try to embrace it's useful qualities in classrooms? Redirecting seems so much more efficient than banning them as a whole. Who knows, maybe one day they'll be a requirement in some classrooms?