Cell phones....why not?

Why shouldn’t a cell phone be used in the classroom to help aid the students learning. I do not know the amount of money that school districts spend on trying to stop the cell phones in school. A better use of that money might be to try and find some way to implement them into the class. I mean lets be honest, we are never going to stop the use of cell phones in our class. Students get cleverer and the phones get more elaborate it is going to be impossible to stop. We need to stop wasting our time, energy, and money on trying to curb something that could be one of the most useful tools at our disposal.

Josh Allen, who is speaking on the negative side is out of date and needs to recheck his finances. “Laptops are much more versatile yet uniform than cell phones,” is a quote from him that I find totally ridiculous. Why should take money that we probably aren’t speaking to combat cell phones and buy laptops? He is arguing about buying new laptops when we could be using what the students are already bringing to the classroom. I agree laptops would be great, but they are expensive to purchase and maintain; where cell phones are already in most of the students’ hands already! So why not take a little money and find out a curriculum plan that works with a cell phone and integrate it.

Students are always looking for something that is going to engage them. This is a cost effective and easy way to do that, use something they are already bringing to school. This isn’t rocket science, just using the best available resource to the best of your advantage. I feel as a teacher, we need to stop looking at all of the bad things that students are doing these days and start looking at how we can use those moments as teaching moments. Also, how many of those moments are because of bad teaching. One of the big questions that I have is how would we include them in the curriculum. The biggest and most pressing question is why wouldn’t we use something the students are so attached to as a teaching and learning instrument?