Teaching 21st Century Students (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cell Phone)

When I was a high-schooler (which really wasn't that long ago!), very few students had cell phones and those who were in possession of one weren't allowed to use it during school hours (this was also the case for other electronic devices, such as CD players, pagers, handheld game systems, etc.). So, given my memory of that, I find it a very fascinating idea that teachers are starting to incorporate cell phones as a curriculum tool.

The article asks a question at the end: Is using cell phones in class a forward-thinking trend or a recipe for disaster?

I think that using cell phones in an educational context is pretty forward-thinking. Cell phones are becoming an increasing complex and multi-purposed piece of technology that may eventually find its way to becoming as ubiquitously used as computers. It seems like a good idea to teach students ways of using it in an educational setting. Not only that, unlike with using school computers, a student's cell phone would be a familiar object to the student, one that he/she would already be fairly well-versed in using.

It's very likely that many students may abuse it to do texting in class, but all that really is is a more high-tech version of what students have been doing for years when they wanted to carry on a conversation in class without the teacher knowing: passing notes. A bigger problem could be students finding ways to use it to cheat on exams. One possible way to deal with that could be to do what university professors do: tell students to turn off/put away all electronic devices before the test can be passed out.

On a whole, it just seems like the potential benefits of making cell phones a classroom tool outweigh the potential drawbacks.

The NETS-A standard applicable here is the third standard, specifically the part about how administrators must keep up to date on new trends and research involving using new technologies and how they can be used to improve learning.