Somehow or other I’ve been running across a lot of material lately about whether we should have cellphones in school. At my school cellphones are definitely verboten because of the distraction their use can create as well as how it easy they make it to cheat on a test. (It’s almost impossible to catch someone texting if they’re a bit careful.)

In contrast to that, our school librarian recently went to a webinar (I saw part of it) on cellphone usage in the class. The presenter argued that we should be opening up the classroom to these phones. Why? They’re capable of the most incredible multimedia effects such as taking photos, recording video, and recording audio not to mention playing all of these back. The vast majority of kids in high school have cellphones, and that’s trickling down as kids get their first phone at a younger and younger age.

As a teacher who likes to play with media, this caught my attention. The kids can provide the portable recording studios for the podcasts I dream up for them? This is great! I’ve had endless hassles trying to get time for the kids on a computer in a quiet corner of the school free from distraction. Now they can take their “studios” anywhere in the school and record there.

Larry Ferlazzo, by contrast, argues in favor of his school’s cellphone ban. At his school they’ve found cellphones break up school community by making it easy to arrange for fights after class, and they leave the kids in touch with the distractions of often fragmented homes. In both cases, this disrupts the learning.

Darren Draper thinks that we can have it all. While cellphones can cause problems, he thinks we need to work to lessen or eliminate those problems while still enjoying the rich benefits that these devices can bring. He proposes five simple rules (borrowed from Liz Kolb):

1. Phone ringers must be set to vibrate at all times.
2. Phones are placed at the front of the room, away from all students, when they are not in use as a class.
3. All media/messages must be course related.
4. All media published about/of others must be approved by them.
5. All messages can be accessed at any time (through cellphone companies – no message/media is private)!

One thing Darren Draper does make clear is that his students are generally responding appropriately to the increased cellphone freedom. I think I know how he feels. When I’ve given my students the benefit of the doubt in grey areas around computer usage, they rarely disappoint me. Despite being 14-16 years old, they generally understand what’s appropriate, and if your relationship with them is positive they don’t want to disappoint you or put you in an awkward situation with your administrators.

So what do I think about cellphone usage in the class? I’m not sure yet. I’m mulling it over but I am leaning toward the phones. Right now I don’t have a phone myself, so I’m not really sure what these machines can do. I may have to rectify that gap in my knowledge.

I came across the website ThisIsSand.com and immediately thought, “Well, this is kind of dumb.” As you hold your left mouse button down, sand drops. That didn’t exactly seem thrilling. Well, it turned out that the website wasn’t dumb, but I was. I just didn’t catch on that you could change the color of the sand you were dropping. As you did that, you could come up with a very abstract or very concrete picture of whatever you wanted. You can save your project to the This Is Sand gallery so you can look at it later, and that makes it possible for a teacher to grade the projects.

This Is Sand is a pretty simple idea that has really neat results.

I found this video on someone else’s blog. It reminded me of most of my classses. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Hanging out on Twitter this morning someone tweeted about a new online game they’d found called Energyville. In it you are the all powerful entity that makes energy choices for a company and determines just how it will be powered. Almost any type of energy is available, and you’re rated on the economic, environmental, and security impacts of your decisions. You play in the present, and again in 2015. Random events such as terrorists attacks, droughts, or storms at sea affect the supply of certain kinds of energy.

Being sponsored by the energy company Chevron, there are, understandably, some issues of bias. Yet this remains an intriguing introduction to the choices made when we use power. Whether solar power, gasoline, or hydro power, there are costs involved in these decisions and I think this game does a decent job of reflecting that. It should prove as an interesting jumping off point for a discussion on energy use, environmentalism and stewardship.

If you team Energyville with a few rounds of ElectroCity you might have a great class period. In ElectroCity you also need to keep your city powered, but this simulation offers fewer types of electricity but more of other things like building, powering and paying for city amenities like farms, camp grounds, docks or ski hills. Between the two these sims you’ve got a great start for thought provoking class discusion.

I found this really intriguing video on the ClioTech blog. It’s an intriguing look at how a connected 21st Century Student could go about learning. I can’t help thinking that this all might be too much for a high school student (and maybe even tough for a university student) but surely the teachers (and the profs) can be moving in this direction.