Cell Phones are Distracting, and....

I've seen the headline "Kids do a lot better when schools ban cell phones" and the Facebook likes and the laments to "put that thing down and go outside and play".    I can see the huge potential for distraction that cell phones pose in the classroom with their constant buzzing, vibrating and beeping.  There's the Pavlovian response to check it. And, kids these days (and adults too) are conditioned to pull out their phones to record everything with a picture, a text or a post.  What possible educational purpose could these devices possibly serve?

The study, as presented in the CNN article, by researchers Richard Murphy and Louis-Philippe Beland, focused on the distraction potential of cell phones.  It's not clear that the researchers differentiated between schools or teachers who had an academically oriented BYOD policy and those who threw cell phones into the classroom distraction be damned.

I think the article is right and wrong at the same time. I think the effect on student achievement of anything, whether it’s technology, a new program or a textbook, lies entirely in its implementation. I think a smart phone is nothing more than a computer that a student owns and has, potentially, constant access to. I think students don’t know how to use technology for academic purposes and especially don’t know how to use technology for anything beyond canned practice and assessment programs. I think students need to be taught how to use their devices for rich academic purposes. I think that texting, snapchatting, etc. during class is the digital equivalent to passing notes and that we need to have effective discipline strategies that focus on the behavior not the device. I think smartphones in the classroom is in its infancy and we are gradually developing ways to harness the power of these tiny, always up to date, ubiquitous computers that everyone has in their pockets. I wonder why anyone would consider banning them and in the next breath spend thousands of dollars on computers.

Since I think all these things, I looked up the authors, read the original study here: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf

Among many other things, the authors state that

“The existing literature on the impact of technology in the classroom implies that the unstructured presence of technology has ambiguous impacts on student achievement. We add to this by illustrating that a highly multipurpose technology, such as mobile phones, can have a negative impact on productivity through distraction.”

The key is in how teachers implement the access to these “highly multipurpose” devices. If they’re just going to be buzzing in their pockets, then they’ll be a distraction and should, sadly, remain banned. However, teachers can work together on manageable ways to use devices in class to improve instruction and student achievement instead of relying on a ban to remove distractions and increase the attention and motivation of students to learn traditionally taught content.