Phones. Oh, phones. How much time do I spend playing Words with Friends? Going through random mail? Playing (more) Words with (more) Friends? Flashing over to Facebook? Checking Yelp for Thai food? Looking at orange and red Google roads?

I understand how seductive phone time can seem. At this point, for that reason, I strongly believe teachers need to keep phones out of the classroom. No good comes of letting these little bundles of gaming and internet connectivity into the room. Students will point out academic uses for their phones, but no academic use exists that compensates for the time loss from texting, gaming and surfing.

Students can work with real calculators. They can use classroom technology to search for information on the internet.* They can even use books.

Relating back to my last post, you don’t want to let the worms into your classroom, right? Well, the phones have worms. They have jewels, footballs, candy, tanks, soldiers, and even nuclear weapons. So no phones. No mercy, either. Let one phone in, and pretty soon the phones will reproduce. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be hiding in pockets throughout the classroom.

Eduhonesty: IMPORTANT phone advice. Do not seize phones unless absolutely unavoidable. If you must seize them, keep them on your person. Depending on school procedures, hand them off to administration as soon as possible if allowed. I have seen colleagues accused of damaging phones or losing/taking phones that disappeared. If the whole class sees where you stash the phone, someone may take advantage of that fact.

Guard your own phone and install password protection. I still remember trying to help a colleague find her new, expensive birthday present. Sadly, she never did find that phone.

*In the absence of classroom technology, especially when other resources are scarce, phone usage becomes considerably more complicated. I have let phones into the room in that situation.