IN DEFENCE OF MOBILE PHONES

At the start of a new term, there has been renewed calls for schools to ban mobile phones. As we can see in this BBC news article, just under half of parents want mobile phones banned in schools, according to a survey carried out by uSwitch. Many schools have already implemented a ban and it seems very clear that the government would be in favour of banning mobile phones, in fact, Nick Gibb has stated this quite clearly.

I can appreciate the problem of mobile phones in schools and have delivered an assembly about them, in the disguise of a new drug called ‘Amprohnest’. If anybody would like the PPT of that assembly, then feel free to contact me via Twitter @MrGSimpson. Despite my reservations though, I certainly would not want them banned in school as I see this mini-computer as a powerful tool for learning.

In fact, I think it is our duty to teach the students how to deal with their mobile phone habit, as Paul Howard-Jones argues in the news article above. Just because we ban them from school does not mean they go away, it just means that we potentially defer the ‘bad’ behaviour. So let us deal with the issue in school rather than ignoring it through banning them. Let us teach them how to self-regulate and understand when it is a good time to use mobile phones and a bad time.

How can schools claim to have well-behaved students by taking away mobile phones which they have in their lives outside of schools? Surely you have done your job well as a school if a student can use them in an appropriate manner? Bullying used to exist without mobile phones and phones may have made this easier but bullying is wrong full stop, so we must teach our students that this is wrong no matter how it is done. Some argue that it is a distraction in class but students can be distracted by anything and we need to teach them how to concentrate on what the teacher is saying or the task they have been asked to do. When modern calculators first entered schools, boys up and down the country were using them to spell the word ‘BOOBIES’, does that mean calculators should have been banned? Of course not, as they are an extremely powerful aid to learning. As teachers, we have to make sure students have the right moral code and banning things will not help us do this.

Anyway, here are some reasons why I think mobile phones are good in the classroom:

1. You can use them for retrieval learning activities, such as the quizzes I have created on Kahoot. Not all schools will have Chromebooks or iPads to hand and the little mini-computer in their pocket is really good for this kind of stuff. Kahoot is great as it automatically records the results for you and the students like the competitive element of it.
2. As an Economics teacher, there are often times that I want to find out some information that would support the learning that I’m doing or just to double check that I haven’t made a mistake. I have no qualms about students helping me with this by using their mobile phones if it is during a discussion part of the lesson.
3. Sometimes, I might want them to take photos and embed them into an activity they are doing and obviously mobile phones are excellent for this, as well as making videos. If you download a program like PicPac, you can also make stop-go animations. I recently saw this being used in a Geography lesson to explain a particular geographical phenomenon.
4. In the 6^th Form I want to encourage my students to attend Think Tank events or lectures and there are some times (not often) when I encourage them to sign up in lesson time in order for them to guarantee a spot before they all go.
5. In a very simple way, they can be used as a spellchecker and as a calculator. Why carry around lots of different stuff when one thing will do?

If mobile phones become a problem in your lesson, then just get better at dealing with bad behaviour in your lessons. If there are clear rules about mobile phones in school and in your lessons, enforce them but at the same time, teach them the reasons why those rules exist. Encourage them to self-regulate and show them how enjoyable being offline can be.

From someone who teachers mainly 6^th form, I’m actually more concerned about the rise of laptops than mobile phones, as shown in the studies about the negative impact of laptops on learning. These seem to be a much more respected tool for learning and yet could be far more damaging. I am not a big fan of laptops in lessons and yet they seem to be encouraged but this could be a case of ‘whataboutery’ and therefore I’ll just stick to discussing mobile phones.

As with most arguments in education, the mobile phone debate is much more nuanced than it first appears from the headlines. I believe that the benefits of having the opportunity to use mobile phones in lessons outweigh the costs and would not like to see them banned. I think it should come down to the personal choice of the teacher but I also understand how that might cause problems with consistency across a school. It’s no doubt a debate that will continue but I genuinely think that banning mobile phones in school is not going to help with the wider societal issues caused by them. Education is the key to dealing with most problems, so let’s educate students about mobile phone use in schools so that they can be better citizens in the future outside of it.