Cell Phones

     Brooks-Young wrote a chapter in the book on cell phones including statistics, viewpoints, strategies, and suggestions.  She laid out a lot of statistics that can be somewhat surprising when realizing how big of an impact cell phones really do have on society and children at such a young age.  The first stat that seemed very drastic was how the number of teenagers using cell phones has raised from 36% to 79% in just three years.  That just shows that the rate of teenagers using technology is continuing to advance at a rapid rate.  Another extremely surprising statistic was that forty-six percent of children ages 9-11 have cell phones and twenty percent of children ages 6-8 have them as well.  Some might not think this is a huge number but I think for children of this age that is a very substantial number.
     I can see both the advantages and disadvantages that involve using cell phones in the classroom.  Part of me feels that using cell phones is not a necessary part of school for children especially for schools who are getting iPads and laptops for their students because virtually an iPad is going to do everything and more for the children that a cell phone will do.  If they do have access to this kind of technology than I feel cell phones will just be a distraction because all students will be using them for is to text or call friends which is just a distraction from class.  There are however some ways that as a teacher you could incorporate the cell phone.  I know personally I have played around with the polleverywhere.com and set up different quizzes and polls and I think that if you were going to allow students to have cell phones and want them to incorporate them into learning this is such a great way to do it.  I also feel that dealing with the cell phone problem will take a lot of time and energy that might be spent on something more productive.  I have mixed feelings about the use of cell phones, but we are getting to a point in time where incorporating them might be the best and most effective use of time and technology.