kids will google how to defeat these and find a 30 second tutorial that requires one rare earth magnet.At my niece's school, all the kids have a lockable pouch they have to carry around. They have to show the teacher its locked at the start of the school day. They can unlock it at lunchtime, then lock again until hometime.
That big disc thing is the magnetic unlocker. It seems to work, because my niece hates it!
It is possible to force it open (I did it just to see) but it requires a fair bit of strength and feels like it might break. If the kids break them they have to pay for a replacement.
Yep, that is exactly the thing. We weren't allowed to have it and it seemed like kids/parents understood that idea. However, things have changed this all starts at home…parents need to actually parent their children into understanding that those things aren't acceptable at school.
It's not going to do the job because the problem is harder than "kids have phones in school". Besides, they'll just have a smartwatch or something that will let them use it anyway or their parents will give them an iPad with all the same features.
They can use the 1:1 Technology. They don't need a phone/smartphone.
There is a fundamental difference is what I'm telling you; they treat this device as an extension of their identity. I have authority in my classroom, enforcing everything else is easy, this though is a problem. I have had students get in my face over it, they don't do this with anything else.
In a lot of schools we've already lost. A lot of teachers have basically no authority anymore. You can't discipline kids with consequences and you can't threaten kids with risk of failure due to underperformance. Partially its due to parents getting too precious about their kids, but a lot of it is also that ever since No Child Left Behind the relentless drive from every level of education management, from the federal government down to the local district, has been to "improve metrics" without investing any real funding or research into actual education (plenty of money for Chromebooks however). The end result is that the incentives for every principal and superintendent become not allowing kids to risk failing classes and not allowing teachers to record disciplinary incidents because that's how you make the numbers look better.
I mean, you are correct, but attempts to intervene on this are inconsistent at best. I think we had an article the other month about a school that did it successfully, but it can't be just a school-by-school thing. There has to be a coordinated effort to figure out an actual strategy around this and people in power don't even seem to have it on their radar. I really do think a lot of this is downstream of No Child Left Behind in the sense that the move towards obsession with the metrics has caused actual obfuscation of real problems in education. Education in the US has become incredibly technocratic and its papering over these gaping social problems underneath.
Right? It's mind-boggling, a ban is obvious.
lol, for real... as if a phone would help or protect you during such an event anyway 🙄
This.
??? Schools confiscated kids' properties all the time in the past, from walkmen to headphones to Gameboys to whatever. Phones are no different.
Big "so you hate waffles" energy here
Not even, really. I don't know where or when you grew up but my generation sure as shit didn't have those things lol. Someone bringing a walkman or a Gameboy in class would have it confiscated immediately.
The whole keep it silent and in your bag just doesn't work. They cannot handle that temptation, they get the notification it must be checked and responded to.
The problem with "just take them away" is the kids will literally fight you over it and parents/admin will take their side. Shit has changed in weird and bad ways.
Tablets at wife's HS has microsoft and google apps and students messaging one another via their portal. I think YT might be blocked to an extent (might be embed videos work only), but she says the browser is active, so they can browse through reading stuff in class
I mean, sure, but how would that even work? When I was a kid, devices were banned "at a school level" in that it was the school who made the rule and that applied to all classes, but at the end of the day it was enforced by teachers if they caught a kid with said device in the class. How else would you enforce that? You can't search every backpack upon school entry every day lol
Well, admins = school admins right? So the school admins need to ban the phones and put their foot down, and parents should have no say in this. "This teacher took my kid's phone!" "Yes they did sir, phones are banned per Article x.y of the school's code of conduct, those are the rules, period".
Absolutely this and also very important. With everyone having a phone and being quick to record you, teachers will quickly end up ending their careers and destroying their reputation, by being baited into unperfect behaviour.
I'm not sure what to say here other than I just wish it was this easy, it clearly isn't though.
It needs to be district policy from a superintendent. It is absurd to leave it up to the individual teacher in a classroom. It has to be a blanket policy and if a district is leaving it up to teachers and staff, they are guilty of mismanagement or even malpractice. And they are setting their teachers up for failure.
In California lawyers have gotten involved and teachers have been arrested and fired for "theft" and "battery" for confiscating phones from students. Unions here now tell teachers to not get involved and state they are powerless with disruptive students backed by parents on in class phone usage. Too many Karen's getting front row access to the managers
It is a district policy, but it is one that is left to teachers to enforce with no real ban insight. It's like saying hey this is a rule that you must enforce but the other teacher doesn't or even worse we aren't going to do anything about it when the rule is broken. I deal with both problems.
Man, I didn't even think about the camera aspect of this - what a potential nightmare, and social media in general just seems like an awful thing if you're a victim at school already. I'm not a parent but I have to imagine a zero tolerance, don't bring it to school / lock it up on entry policy is probably the only real answer here. There's just no valid reason I can think of as to why they need them during the school day, and until we better understand the effects these things have on developing brains (all signs point to: not good, so far), having kids take a break from them during those hours can only be a good thing. Personally I don't think allowing them at lunch/breaks is even needed, just check-in at the start, and get it back at the end. Give their brains a break from the addictive garbage.
Part of the issue is you can ban phones, but if the parents still send their kids to school with an ipad or a smartwatch that ban is literally meaningless. They'll have access to all of the same apps and functionality as on their phone and parents won't see the issue at all because "I need to keep in touch with my kid." Like, no, you don't need to be texting your kid about dinner in the middle of science class.
