A colleague of mine bans mobiles during lesson time. I try to control their use because they are useful for looking up vocabulary and stuff.
I tried to ban their use in class back in 2009, 2010, but it’s useless and frankly counter-productive to try to ban them now. All it’ll do is make the students develop a grudge against you and they’ll see you as a draconian, out-of-touch authoritarian. Even the best students in class fire off a quick LINE message when they’ve finished their work. The key is to keep usage down to a bare minimum and make sure students are engaged even if they check the odd LINE message occasionally.
They are banned in my classrooms. If they want to look something up, they can ask for permission. When we have activities, they are welcome to use them for research. And my tests are open-book, so they can use them at will, then.
Seriously, if you allow total freedom, one of them is going to be looking shit up and the other fifty are going to be chatting to their mates on LINE.
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I don’t allow total freedom, but I like the idea of asking for permission to use them. I don’t want to break up the flow of the lesson, though.
My (high school) teacher pals all use something like this.
Students drop their phones inside coming in to the classroom and then get them on their way out.
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I don’t find it breaks up the flow of the lesson. If there’s a word or concept that they don’t understand, they can ask me to explain or elaborate. If they’re doing book or hand-out exercises/activities, all they need to do is ask " Teacher, I need to look something up". A simple “no problem” from me.
I find that my media studies and public relations students are better at grasping this complexity than my first-years, or as they like to call themselves, “freshmen”.
I think that the older students are obviously more au fait with thinking for themselves and showing initiative than the newbies, fresh out of Taiwanese high school, who have been taught “shut up and listen to teacher”.
Cell phones are too powerful of a distraction now. Before smartphones, all you could do covertly was text. Now theres’s all types of games, apps, social media, everything right at your fingertips. And the dopamine hits from receiving a notification are damn strong.
I’ve only ever taught little kids and adults, and not the tricky age group in between. But I can’t imagine teaching without a cell phone jail. Even I would have to put my cell phone in the jail to keep from looking at it.
I don’t think a cellphone jail would be necessary at uni level. The teacher just needs to tell the students to keep their phones in their bags. If they get them out without permission they get points deducted. There could also be logistic issues with 40-60 students in a lecture theatre. I can imagine phones going missing.
I’m a bit torn about it. I think I prefer the way I do things. I prefer to assume adult behaviour because it’s more likely to encourage students to behave that way. If they take the piss then I come down on them. Each to their own, though. I’m sure all methods end up with similar results.
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Yeah it’s definitely a bit childish to have to resort to imprisoning everyone’s cell phone. Works in secondary school, but at the university level, students need to be responsible for their own education since they’re (generally) the ones choosing to receive it.
Of course, this is easy for me to say. I liked college. Sometimes it seemed like everyone around me hated it.
They’re legally children until age 20. 
Well, is would be the simplest choice.
Most 18-22 year olds are not that motivated. The whole college experience burns you out after getting into your 4th year. Which also happens to be the most difficult in classes with addition to finding jobs that year.
What they need to do imo is to cut out all the gen ed. I really did not need to spent my days in a geology lab licking rocks and minerals. This added nothing to my life or marketable skills. College could easily be a 3 year experience with a few electives.
This will both lessen student debt and get people better trained in their field as they’re focused entirely on that. Also cut out people who has no business taking out huge loans when they have zero clue on what they want to do and just do gen ed classes and hope they figure it out.
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Aren’t you just describing technical/trade schools?
Technical and trade schools usually cover certain fields. In Europe, they don’t make you take all these random classes not related to what you want to do. My girl is in the law program for undergrad, all of her classes are law classes.
Incorporating social media as a research tool into lesson plans works best for US college kids now
And who’s responsible if one phone ends up “disappearing”?
There’s a solution for that too: don’t bring your phone to class in the first place. 
I know, I know… but if you live on campus, why not just leave it in your room? And if you commute, it’s not like the prof wants to read your damn I’m-running-late text anyway.
Not for me, I was extremely motivated and i was finished college by 21. I studied a broad range of scientific subjects and loved almost all of it.
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So far it hasn’t been an issue for my high school teacher friends. 25 kids per class, not too hard to keep up with. I think it would be pretty hard to steal somebody else’s phone with the teacher, and all your classmates waiting to get their phone out after you, watching you pick up yours. But I’m sure mixups have happened.
Get a signal jammer.
Be sure to buy enough to cover the area of your lecture hall.