School Cellphone Ban Spawns Thriving Niche Storage Market
mashable.com
mashable.com
A modern feature/smartish phone of the kind that a teenager can afford in the UK (usually a Blackberry because of the superb social network that RIM have accidentally built) could be really useful in the classroom.
I've had students taking photos of solutions to examples in the class as a quick way of capturing information; I've had students using WolframAlpha to plot graphs/check the solution to equations; I've had specific students playing a youtube about a mathematics skill so they can see a different explanation. I provide PDF files scaled so each page is a flashcard when viewed on the typical small screen; just use A6 slide size and 24 point text.
The problem is the attention disruption that occurs through the messaging. Maybe a class set of iPod touches running on a closed wifi?
Well I would hope so.
>may not be a good signal to send.
Oh make no mistake, their presence really disgusts me, this is just another off-putting aspect.
Oh yes, we had lots of ways of loosing attention when I was a teenager long before the invention of mobile phones.
With the phones, the disruption comes from outside in the form of messages, not from the student's own brain. The latter can be managed by changes of activity and movement round the space (plenary/group/present/plenary type lessons). The former disrupts even the interested students.
For that matter... why don't schools let kids keep their phones on silent and in their lockers? Using your phone in class? Get yelled at. Throwing paper airplanes in class? Get yelled at.
This is not a hard or new problem.
Perhaps they have a discipline problem in schools nowadays, but that doesn't have to become a technology problem.
I would like to see schools embrace small gadgets, instead of banning them, some how. I mean they do have lots of educational value if you want to use it for that.
I think in the prior example, they actually complained about the publicity they were getting because it clued in competitors, without significantly benefiting them, because their market was going to walk past the truck anyway.
They don't allow men to bring bags into the stadium. But they don't have a bag storage service (at least the last time I went). So random businesses around it provide bag checks for a nominal fee.
Funnily enough, they allow women to bring large bags and purses inside.
Rules like this really are stupid when you realize just how non-binary these distinctions are in reality.
Any ideas on how to fix it?
I like the retail shop storage idea; there is usually a newsagent/sweetshop somewhere near most large secondary schools.
(If schools are acting like the TSA...)
Back in my day we didn't have phones in class (they were too big and expensive). We still played up, did little work and achieved nothing :)
If the teachers gave a toss and were engaging, it would be a different story.
I have multiple reasons for saying this. One reason of lesser importance (but perhaps more interesting) is: who's to say these trucks aren't copying the flash drives off smartphones?
I'm all for entrepreneurship but society has already decided that education is not up for a free market, so it's not worth haggling over tiny details like this.
However, there definitely are ways to exploit this. For example, the person holding the phones could search for nude pictures, or material in text messages that could be used to blackmail the children (possibly the same thing, not necessarily).
I think having a bunch of "cell phone lockers" in a very public area of a public school would guard against that kind of thing pretty effectively. It would take a conspiracy of school employees to pull it off and really not be worth it.