Cell Phones Maybe Useful

By Caleb Fort

Posted: December 6, 2009 at 2:52 a.m.

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ROGERS — Cell phone use among students is common during the school day, said Ben Smith, a 17-year-old student at Rogers Heritage High School.

Although it’s not for anything school-related, some educators said phones could be useful educational technology.

“I think the day is coming when cell phones have a place in education,” said Karen Steen, principal of Heritage. “Technology is changing. Part of our job is teaching students those skills.”

For now, students text each other on the sly to say hello or make after-school plans, Smith said.

Some teachers don’t care if students text at school, Smith said. In classrooms where teachers do care, students text under the desk or use their phones during trips to the bathroom, he said.

Rogers, Bentonville, Springdale and Fayetteville school districts do not allow students to use cell phones during the school day, except during lunch at some schools.

State law says schools must prohibit students’ possession of electronic communications devices during the school day, except in special circumstances. That law, created in the time of pagers and beepers, has shaped schools’ approaches but is not strictly followed, said Alan Wilbourn, spokesman for Fayetteville Public Schools.

Cell phones in schools can serve as vehicles for cheating and inappropriate pictures, administrators said.

More than anything, phones are distracting, school officials said. Students text each other when they should be paying attention.

“They’re tuning out the teacher and tuning in their friends,” said David Smith, assistant principal at Oakdale Middle School and Ben Smith’s father. “It’s just a more sophisticated way of passing notes.”

A lot more sophisticated.

Even low-end cell phones can send text messages and take pictures. More expensive models are handheld computers capable of browsing the Web and running a variety of applications.

It’s that range of functions that makes the phones a liability and also a potentially powerful teaching tool, the use of which is prohibited in school.

Students caught using their phones during the school day face consequences including detention and having their phones confiscated to be picked up later by their parents.

Trying to police thousands of cell-phone-wielding students drains the time of teachers, administrators and parents, said Gary Compton, superintendent for the Bentonville Public Schools. His son, who can send text messages with the phone in his pocket, recently had his phone confiscated for texting during the school day, Compton said.

Text messages, shouted conversations and voyeuristic use are a few of the many problems cell phones can cause in schools, Compton said. But he said he is sure phones have a place in the future of education.

Map software could teach students about directions and geography, Compton said. Other software could be used to study the weather.

Teacher could create cell-phone-based polls to instantly gauge how well students were learning material.

“The problem for education is how we strike that balance of utilizing that wonderful technology against kids texting their girlfriends or texting the answers to the test,” Compton said.

Lance Arbuckle, assistant principal at Rogers High School, said the answer will vary among districts. Officials in each district have to decide whether the technology can be used effectively for education and whether students’ parents will accept it.

Arbuckle said he is not in a position to answer either of those questions for Rogers Public Schools.

The Rogers School Board relaxed the district’s policy this summer. Students can now use cell phones with the permission of an administrator.

Joye Kelley, president of the board and a former teacher, said cell phones are too distracting to have a place in the classroom for the most part, especially because the Internet is already available on school computers.

Steen said administrators at Heritage let students use their phones to call home when a storm forced an early release. Administrators also let students phone family for other reasons during the day, she said.

Cell phones have not been incorporated into any classes, though, and unauthorized use is punished, Steen said.

“We try to take off some of the restrictions, but on the other hand, we still have a school to run,” she said.

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