Interview: Cell Phone Use in the Classroom

I interviewed, Mike, the director of technology for the school my children attend.  Mike has taught computer classes in the recent past and understands clearly the policies of his school in regards to cellphone use in the classrooms.  The school where he works is a K-12 private school that is highly technological.  This coming school year, every elementary classroom will have at least 10 iPads for student use if not more.  In grades 6 -12 all classes are taught with the use of an iPad.  It is a requirement that each student in jr. high and high school brings an iPad to school each day or they are not prepared to learn.  Because students are already on iPads with strict rules in place about how to properly use them, cellphones are not allowed to be out during class time.  Any learning that would take place on a cellphone is accomplished on an iPad.  However, before the high school went 1:1 iPads, many teachers, including Mike, did use cell phones for a variety of reasons.  Mike has had his students take surveys on their cell phones as well as search for information on the web.  He also had his students do formative online assessments.  He did have rules in place in regards to their use.  If anyone was caught using social media, texting, looking at sites not connected to the lesson or checking email during class time then they lost the privilege to have their phone in class.  They would then have to do the in-class assignment at home rather than in class and they would only get partial credit for the assignment because then it was considered late.  The school’s policy at that time had a loosely enforced ban on personal cell phone use in class; however, teachers were always given freedom to decide if cell phone use was appropriate during learning time.   At the beginning of the school year, Mike had each student bring a permission slip from home stating that they were allowed to use their cell phone for instructional purposes in the classroom.  This was the only parental involvement in connection to cellphone use in the classroom.  The challenges Mike faced were when students did not receive permission to use the cellphone or when students did not have a phone of their own.  Mike just had these students use the class computers in place of the cell phone.  He also found that the novelty of using the cellphones wore off part way through the year in part due to the small screens.  Another challenge was the limited battery life.  Because Mike taught in the middle of the day, he discovered that many of the phones had died before class started or died in the middle of class.  Mike liked using cell phones for some lessons because he found the students to be very engaged in the lesson when cell phones were allowed to be used, but found the above listed challenges to be a very real issue.  If he were still teaching, he would probably still allow students to use cellphones on very select occasions that he deemed appropriate, but not as often as he did before.