preview

Cell Phones in the Classroom: Keep Them Banned, or Incorporate Them?

Better Essays

Cell phones are quickly becoming a child and teenager’s new best friend. In fact, they even seem to be replacing human contact, and are now how both children and teenagers communicate with each other. Cell phone sales have sky rocketed at an alarming rate, and many of the consumers are under the age of 18, meaning they are still in elementary and high school. Society has influenced students to feel that they need to own a cell phone to be “cool”, thus making the issue of cell phones in the classroom society context vs. students (area 13). Cell phones have now begun to be a large distraction in the classroom, and are the newest item that many schools have had to implement a policy for; many of these policies simply ban the use of cell …show more content…

Keeping this in mind, is it possible that allowing a student to have a cell phone in class, thus alleviating the feeling of anxiousness, could potentially make a student less distracted then by them actually using the cell phone? Privacy has always been an issue in classrooms, but now with more and more students having access to a cell phone with a camera built in, these issues are becoming more apparent and with a greater intensity. Cell phones with a camera, also known as a “camera phone”, provide students with an opportunity to quickly send an incriminating or embarrassing photo to a vast number of people in a short period of time. This is not just a concern for teacher’s privacy, but it is also a concern regarding bullying; students now have access to an entirely new form of bullying by sending pictures or texts to the person that is being bulled. Privacy issues are inevitable, and will always be a problem in a school setting; therefore, privacy cannot be the sole reason to ban cell phones from school. If people were to stop and take into consideration the potentially positive effects of having a cell phone in the classroom, the ban on cell phones may not have been put into effect so quickly. Expanding on the ideas of Vicki Davis, a teacher who blogs regularly, cell phones can be used positively in the classroom. Cell phones can allow students to be more organized; every cell phone has a calendar option in which students would be able to write

Get Access