Smartphones in the classroom: can we apply a little common sense here, please?

On March 2, New York mayor Bill de Blasio will lift a ban on cellphones in the city’s schools. Once the unpopular veto gets lifted, one that many people ignored anyway — including the mayor’s own son, — schools will have three options: phones could be taken onto the premises as long as they are left in backpacks and brought out only for emergencies; they could be used during break times and in specific places; or occasionally made part of a class.

The idea here surely is to use our common sense: obviously, smartphones are potentially disruptive or distracting in the classroom, but it has also become clear that simply banning them from schools is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As things stand, smartphones are the best platform for making technology accessible to the greatest number of people and thus avoiding the so-called digital divide: the next generation of terminals will cost as little as twenty five dollars, and using them in education makes more and more sense.

I can think of few more wasteful things than students carrying a powerful computer around with them in their pockets, but not being allowed to take them into the classroom because they’ll be distracted by them.

The problem here isn’t that kids are being distracted by phones, but that parents, teachers, and school boards are unable to rethink education in terms of using them. Education must be about teaching our children to see their phones as something that has multiple uses, and that simply requires some specific protocols.

Just because smartphones can be used for playing games or sending messages during class doesn’t mean they have to be banned or their use severely restricted. Instead, what we have to do is provide an open, user-friendly environment for phones in the classroom, with charging facilities and free WiFi, coupled with an environment in which the search for information on phones is an integral part of the teaching process.

As to when children should be given their first smartphone, the answer is as simple as: “from the age that they don’t try to eat it.” The sooner children become familiar with these kinds of tools, the better. If phones are used for play, for communication, for leisure, and are always going to be part of our children’s future, why on earth are we restricting their use in something as essential as education?

With a large-size television screen or a projector, a thirty five dollar Chromecast and children’s own phones, it becomes extremely easy to teach how to search and manage information, integrating it into the educational process, with children sending the results of their searches via a browser to the screen.

Instead, what large numbers of schools are doing is the very opposite: pathetic and pointless bans on the use of smartphones in the classroom, the outcome of which is that children see their colleges as disconnected from the real world, places locked in the past. Outside, they once again find answers to their questions by tapping into their smartphones.

Just what kind of message are we sending to our children by forcing them to pack away technological advances when they pass through the school gates that are part of their present and will be part of their future? Why do they have to feel as if they had to downgrade their brains when they enter the school premises? Are teachers and parents really so incapable of working out ways to incorporate the smartphone into the educational process? Can they really not imagine the possibilities that such a device offers? How much longer are we going to have to wait for education and technology to team up by applying a little common sense?

(En español, aquí)