I’m inclined towards just banning cellphones in schools. For 70% of the students this will be enough to ensure they don’t use one (number made up based on experience of recalcitrant kids in my classes)
Lots of schools ban cellphone use, but students find lots of ways to abuse this rule.
Indeed, when you start to collect phones at the start of class, you find a pretty big share now have burner phones to turn in, so they can still sneak peaks at their phone or take it to the restroom.
on that note why the shit are students permitted to leave the testing area during critical exams (midterms, finals) , ostensibly to use the restroom.
but with phone in pocket, obviously more than a few are googling test answers as well? I've personally witnessed this multiple times over past few years and it makes no sense.
If you meant to say that we can prevent phones from also entering said restroom, then that sounds great. I have my doubts that it’s possible, but I’m fine with that solution in general.
Of course it’s even easier for the parents to just not give your kid a phone
You often can't seize the device. If the student says no you risk physical escalation. Students are VERY protective of their phone due to the personal content on devices.
You often can't suspend or academically punish the student. There are VERY strong incentives in public school systems not to further bury an underperforming student, minority students, and similar criteria. The student may WANT to be suspended.
Students can easily hide the device, like in their underwear, purse, whatever. Again unless you want prison-level strip searches there really isn't a way around this.
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Honestly I think we'd need state/regulatory/infrastructure level tools to enact a ban policy. Think signal-jammers, vpns on legitimate devices, etc. It would be a massive IT cost to enact. IMO it would be worth it, but I don't think society would bare the cost because too few care about education beyond its function as childcare - we have a entire political party that wants to disband the Department of Education.
We shouldn’t waste a massive amount of effort on people that don’t want help.
Did we all forget about books?
If I live my regular professional life using stackoverflow, man pages , Wikipedia, Google Scholar, etc. then I become very proficient using those. It doesn't make any sense forcing students to learn research methods they aren't going to use outside the classroom at least not at the expense of prohibiting the de-facto, gold standard of information sharing i.e the internet.
Saying you can learn without a phone/internet is like saying you can travel via horse or find a job via the classified section. Efficient research and learning is a network dependent skill; if other people use X then you need to know X not Y .