This sucks, because smartphones could be such fantastic tools in a classroom. Not that I’m under the illusion that they’re being used in any sort of productive way (or even would be), I was once a kid scrolling through shitposts and memes in class. But having all of the textbooks in one place, the ability to record lectures and whiteboards for later review, and automated schedule management would’ve definitely made my high school education a lot smoother.
When using the right tools, phones are already incredibly powerful in an educational environment. There’s a reason why Kahoot achieved meme status: it’s because students love it.
The other side of the coin on this. Cell phones as day planners are invaluable. So kids who have spent their lives organizing their schedules on digital calendars are being told “Oops! Sorry. You can’t use that anymore. We caught someone else using it incorrectly.”
Incidentally, I’m old enough to remember how every graphing calculator in the school had video games installed on them and half my class carried a gameboy someone on their persons. This is going to be pure wack-a-mole as a policy. Selectively enforced, with lots of high profile punishments for minor infractions and inevitably highly intrusive misconduct by individual teachers and principles. Richer, whiter students will almost certainly be exempted from the policy through loopholes. Poorer, blacker students will be shoved even more forcefully through the School To Prison Pipeline. Cops will inevitably get involved in the worst possible way.
And all of this will be sold as a means of “reducing distractions”.
This sucks, because smartphones could be such fantastic tools in a classroom. Not that I’m under the illusion that they’re being used in any sort of productive way (or even would be), I was once a kid scrolling through shitposts and memes in class. But having all of the textbooks in one place, the ability to record lectures and whiteboards for later review, and automated schedule management would’ve definitely made my high school education a lot smoother.
When using the right tools, phones are already incredibly powerful in an educational environment. There’s a reason why Kahoot achieved meme status: it’s because students love it.
The other side of the coin on this. Cell phones as day planners are invaluable. So kids who have spent their lives organizing their schedules on digital calendars are being told “Oops! Sorry. You can’t use that anymore. We caught someone else using it incorrectly.”
Incidentally, I’m old enough to remember how every graphing calculator in the school had video games installed on them and half my class carried a gameboy someone on their persons. This is going to be pure wack-a-mole as a policy. Selectively enforced, with lots of high profile punishments for minor infractions and inevitably highly intrusive misconduct by individual teachers and principles. Richer, whiter students will almost certainly be exempted from the policy through loopholes. Poorer, blacker students will be shoved even more forcefully through the School To Prison Pipeline. Cops will inevitably get involved in the worst possible way.
And all of this will be sold as a means of “reducing distractions”.