Wireless devices school plague or instructional aide Phone use in today’s schools remains a controversial issue with many defendants weighing in on both side of the rope. Are laptops, tablets, smartphones a new way to bring learning to the 21st century classroom or have phones and tablets made teaching, learning harder for the class rooms to function properly? Can laptops, tablets, and smartphones with the proper policing and enforcement be integrated into the classroom? Will they help aide in everyday learning, or distract our already distracted students? Many educators have starting using such devices to aid in the teaching process. With apps that span to just about every course, subject, or need and more actually added every day, will the use of these devices in everyday learning soon become inevitable? Have these devices in today’s schools become a plague or an instructional aide?
In Brian Shane’s “Smart Devices Make for Smart Kids” He tells us “Pulling a cellphone out during class used to mean likely confiscation and perhaps detention for students bold enough to try. Now, a growing number of schools are turning to the smartphones students bring with them to school as an instructional device that can augment classroom learning.”(1) Laptop, tablet, and smartphone use in schools can be used to better the overall classroom performance of all students. With the many new apps that stand free to download for students and teachers alike helping bring learning to a platform more understood by today’s youth. Phones and tablets are used more and more in everyday learning environments

to take photos of assignments written on the board, prepare research, and remind students of homework’s due date, lookup vocabulary words and so on. It seems that the list of how devices can be implemented will continue to be ongoing and ever-growing. “A March study by the Pew Research Center found that 77% of young people ages 12-17 have cellphones. One in four have a smartphone. The study found no differences in smartphone ownership across racial, income or ethnic lines. A November study from Teen Research Unlimited, done for the Verizon Foundation, found that 39% of middle-school students use smartphones to do homework. Among them, just 6% said they were permitted to use a smartphone in class.”(1) These numbers will inevitably grow as more and more schools turn to the digital age to help raise school performance with school devices that are available for check out in an increasingly large number of library’s such as, laptops, tablets, and even smartphone in some cases. “Why ignore the fact that our students forever will have a smartphone or an iPad somewhere in the vicinity that they can access anything imaginable?” says Debbie Wessels, an administrator at the Salisbury School. “Everybody needs to understand that this is going to be a shift that is forever going to change the face of education.”(1) Many argue there’s no control but many schools are working toward ways to control mobile devices to limit the use during school for nonrelated school actives. Yet in Michael Birnbaum “Turn Off the Cell and Tune In”, He argues that phones and tablets in classroom breed a plague of students paying more attention to their devices then to the teacher and subject. Under the desk texting, videos of school fights, pictures of exams help to degrade the classrooms purpose and overall effectiveness. Some schools have imposed

strict regulations on cell phone use on school property including banning posting photos taken on school property to any and all public media sites (Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube).But not all photos will remain banned in some cases a student’s parent of family member can take, and post photos of them during school activities such as sporting events, and graduations. This is the case in Prince George County Washington where educators have imposed these restrictions, while schools administrations around the country loosen their