The Cell Phone Debate

In the age of emails and text messages, one of my greatest thrills is getting actual mail. You know, from that man or woman who walks from door to door dropping off envelopes and packages from all around the world. It's incredible stuff. I'm always most excited when my mail carrier brings something good. So, basically anything that's not junk, a bill, or something from the National Student Loan Centre. Yesterday, the greatest thing of all came... a book! Sure, it was one I ordered, and paid for, and was essentially expecting, but the thrill is same.

The book is called "Teaching With the Tools Kids Really Use" by Susan Brooks-Young, and I was inspired to order it based on a conversation I had with some students a few weeks ago...

While supplying one day, I had caught more than one student trying to sneak a text here and there (they're not as sneaky as they think they are... I, myself, once thought I had mastered the art of the Sneaky-Text in university).  The general rule is that I am supposed to confiscate the phone.  However, I'm a supply teacher, and generally detested among most student populations, so, in an effort to be slightly less monstrous, I usually let the first offence slide. (Shame on me). On this particular day though, I was inspired to do some investigating. I asked them why, when they know they could lose their phones for a day (or sometimes longer), they even bother to carry their phones on them at all. The board I teach for has a strict "No Phones At All" policy, so why not lose the temptation and leave the phones in the lockers? The responses wavered from the 'smartassed' to the somewhat logical, but the one that struck me most was when one student said, "It's just what we know."

"It's just what we know."

In a world where the answer to a question can be found in seconds, no matter where we are in the world, by pulling out a cell phone and "Googling" it, at school we are refusing to acknowledge a technology that most of today's students have grown up with.  I know my argument is a controversial one. But it's a conversation I think is worth having.  In the past 3 years of my very short teaching career I have already considered countless times how to appropriately bring the 21st century and ALL of its technologies into the classroom. Education has evolved over hundreds of years in order to teach to the students of the day, and now, all of a sudden I feel as though we've hit a brick wall of resistance.

I think this book will arm me with some powerful information and strategies for the ideas I'd like to set in motion.  It covers everything from "21st Century Skills," cell phones, mp3 players, social networks, virtual worlds, gaming, and "digital citizenship."  Each chapter explains a technology, strategies for use, and (for the naysayers) "common objections" to each technology.  I've only flipped through it so far, but already I'm highly recommending it to any and all teachers who have a dream of a classroom that engages students fully using methods that are meaningful and relevant to them and the 21st century we're all living in.

That's my lecture for today. I've got a a BlackBerry blinking at me for some attention...