Technology in Schools: An Administrator's View
Here is one example of what I am talking about from my school. Thanks to the work of our student newspaper staff on the Devil’s Advocate at Burlington High School, our wake-up call came back in the early part of 2009 (http://
burlingtonhigh.blogspot.com/2009/01/mobile-technology-wealth-of.html) when the students were pushing for a change in our strict policy that prohibited the use of cellphones within the school building. Despite our policy at the time, the Devil’s Advocate reporters uncovered the following statistics from a homeroom survey of students:
• Just under 100% sent or received at least 3 text messages in school each day • 85% sent or received more than 15 texts each day
We clearly had a decision to make when these results were published. There
were two possible options. One possible response would have been to tighten our death-grip on our “traditional" approach to running our school. We could have upped the ante with our punishments for cellphones in the school and kept our minds closed to the idea that there might be some constructive use for cellphones in our school. We could have increased the amount of time and energy that we wasted on this issue with our students and produced results that probably would have differed little from those cited above from our students newspaper.
Fortunately, we chose a different response, one that took into account our mission of producing responsible citizens and centered around the idea that allowing cellphone use in school could have positive implications. Additionally, we began to recognize the fact that in the "real world" people function with cellphones in the workplace and we needed to help our students learn how to do this in a responsible fashion.
Surprisingly, our change in policy was accomplished without too much debate.
The reason for this was that we focused it on placing trust in our teachers. Our policy changed from no cellphones being allowed out in our building during the school day to one that allowed cellphone use in classrooms “at the teacher’s discretion.” The whole point here is not just the resolution to the cellphone issue, the larger point is surrounding the idea of trust.
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