Raising the White Flag on Cellphones

We are approaching a new school year and people like me start to get excited.  The promise of a new year and new opportunities is always something to look forward to.  You spend a summer fixing old challenges and creating new programs or policies.  As we approach August I have been seeing a lot more reports of schools banning cell phones from the classroom and I am now running across research support on the topic as well.  It seems that schools are beginning to raise the white flag on phones despite some earlier excitement about BYOD.

It is surely no secret that I am a BYOD supporter and that I lead a BYOD school.  I recognize that all schools are different and have unique needs.  It is completely within their scope to design their own policies when it comes to what takes place in their buildings and how they use the technology resources they have.  I would like to offer a couple counter points for those schools that simply see them as a distraction to classroom instruction.

My fist question would be, What is your policy climate like?  If your policy is as simple as they are allowed or not allowed, maybe the big picture is being missed.  BYOD is not as simple as the existence of personal devices in a school building.  It is an ed tech instructional initiative.  Your policy should include how students will use their devices as learning tools and the teaching staff has to actually model and support that activity.  Instructional initiatives take planning and follow up after implementation.  Sustaining BYOD is hard work and requires commitment.  Just like any other curriculum or instructional endeavor it takes dedicated people to make it work. 

My next question would be, Are your classrooms engaging?  When I was a kid, there were plenty of distracted students and we didn't have cell phones.  Kids were passing notes, doodling in their notebooks, carving in desks or just plain sleeping.  Those kids, and sometimes me, were simply not being engaged in learning.  I taught once upon a time and I know you can't reach them all, but I never stopped trying.  An engaging classroom environment will prevent distractions.  Lets not forget that a good set of classroom procedures for devices will help too.  Teachers, with proper administrative support, are the key to every success in a school building. 

Cellphones are not going away. They represent a skill set to be managed. They are not a fad that will go away so we should be addressing them and finding a way to leverage their power in the school setting.  I've said before that you have to find a way to win with what you have.  If the kids are on devices, then we should be beating them to the punch make them relevant tools in school.  We also complain that they behave horribly on their phones and they have poor habits.  That's very true, but shouldn’t we be the change we want to see in them?  If we are modeling that devices as tools and not toys, the students will respond.  We need to be catalysts of change and progress and not throwing up a white flag.