WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. — Ariana Leonard’s high school students shuffled in their seats, eagerly awaiting a cue from their Spanish teacher that the assignment would begin.
“Take out your cellphones,” she said in Spanish.
The teens pulled out flip phones, iPhones and Sidekicks. They divided into groups, and Leonard began sending them text messages in Spanish: Find something green. Go to the cafeteria. Take a picture with the school secretary.
Leonard’s class at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Wesley Chapel, a middle- class Florida suburb about 30 miles north of Tampa, is one of a growing number across the country that are abandoning traditional policies of cellphone prohibition and incorporating them into class lessons.
Spanish vocabulary becomes a digital scavenger hunt. Notes are copied with a cellphone camera. Text messages serve as homework reminders.
“I can use my cellphone for all these things; why can’t I use it for learning purposes?” Leonard said. “Giving them something, a mobile device, that they use every day for fun, giving them another avenue to learn outside of the classroom with that.”
Much more attention has gone to the ways students might use phones to cheat or take inappropriate pictures. But as the technology becomes cheaper and more ingrained in students’ lives, that mentality is changing.
“It really is taking advantage of the love affair that kids have with technology today,” said Dan Domevech, executive director of the nonprofit American Association of School Administrators.
Most schools still have prohibitive policies curtailing cellphone use — often with good reason. In Bay County District Schools, a Florida Panhandle district of 27,000 students, seven students were recently arrested after they got into a fight on campus that the superintendent said was instigated through text messages.
Teachers who have incorporated cellphones into their classes say that most students abide by the rules. They note that cheating and bullying exist with or without the phones, and that once they are allowed, the inclination to use them for bad behavior dissipates.
“Kids cheat with pen and paper. They pass notes,” said Kipp Rogers, principal of Passage Middle School in Newport News, Va. “You don’t ban paper.”
