Schools Mute Cellphones

Ah, the sound of students cracking the books and sharpening pencils, it’s music to educators’ ears. But the jingle of a ringing cellphone? The ubiquitous handset remains a controversial item in classrooms nationwide, as districts continue to ban what many consider to be an annoying distraction and potentially, a tool for cheating. Meanwhile, tech advocates dream of the day when schools welcome these powerful, hand-sized computers as tools for learning.

Ginny Wiseman, associate superintendent of the Fayetteville (AR) Public Schools, suggests students in her district not hold their breath. “We cannot have cellphones at school,” she says. “We have had some issues with the cameras, with students taking inappropriate pictures with them.”

From coast to coast, schools are making it clear to students—if teachers see a mobile phone during school hours, it will be confiscated. At Mill Creek Middle School in Kent, WA, Principal Anthony Brown encourages students to store their phones in lockers during the day. Meanwhile, the Davis (CA) Joint Unified School District doesn’t have a set policy, however, the main high school will confiscate a mobile phone if it rings during class, says Bob Kehr, the district’s director of technology.

Still, many digital education experts believe that cellphones represent powerful technology that could benefit learning. “Small devices, like mobile phones, will get cheaper and offer a richer set of uses,” says Chris Walsh, a digital learning specialist with WestEd, an education think tank in Oakland, CA. “Eventually they’ll be like pencils. No different.”

Walsh, a former middle school teacher, understands how distracting a mobile phone can be. “Especially with 30 kids in a classroom, packed to the gills,” he says. But with mobile phones outnumbering personal computers by a factor of three to one, says Walsh, the mobile device has become more commonplace than the PC.

Moreover, cellular devices have grown increasingly sophisticated. Once just a way to take a call on the run, cellphones are now used to text, send email, and route photos. As for Apple’s hot new iPhone, it boasts a direct link to YouTube.

Even Kehr imagines the potential of mobile phones. “We’ve discussed using PDAs,” he says. “But one issue is theft, and two is money.” Kehr worries about making cellphones a required expense for students, especially “in a public education setting when it’s supposed to be free,” he says. Kehr would also like to see more robust applications on mobile phones, enabling students to craft an essay or poem on the device and then text it to their teachers.

At Mill Creek, Brown says most of his kids don’t own mobile phones. The principal maintains that laptops, which every student will have within two years, are still the better investment for Mill Creek’s technology budget. Meanwhile, Fayetteville’s Wiseman maintains a hard line on cellphones at school, as students there can check out laptops from roving carts. “I really don’t see a use for [mobile phones],” she says.

But to Walsh, that’s just missing the point. At some KIPP schools, a group of charter schools that serve low-income communities across the country, teachers are issued cell phones. Their students are expected to call in—even after hours—if they need a homework assignment, for example.

Schools need to reconsider their perspective on cellphones, according to Walsh. They’re potentially a powerful tool for collaborative learning, he says, just imagine their use by study groups and in phone conferencing. “You can now make a call over the computer,” says Walsh. “So, now what’s a phone?”