Are the teachers having trouble with students using their smartphones in class yet?
Is it standard classroom policy to have the phones off?
When I was teaching in the US, we had a no cellphone policy, but the teachers could not enforce it.
Students were crafty in how they hide their phones and routinely text each other, even cheating on exams using their phones.
Teachers could never prove the cheating unless they subpoenaed the student’s phone bill log.
Some teachers experimented with lessons having the students look up stuff on their phones, but those were the idealistic ones.
Other teachers ended up getting a cell signal jammer for their classrooms.
Do the teachers in Taiwan have to resort to buying a cell signal jammer for their classroom yet?
Just curious on how the Taiwan classrooms compared to the US. Thanks.
When I was a kid, we weren’t even allowed to use slide rules in math class. This was WAY before the advent of pocket calculators. Guess them old fogeys are feeling pretty damn stupid now. Well, they’re probably all dead by now, but you get the picture. My neices in Scotland don’t carry schoolbags any more, as the school has provided them with ipads that have all their textbooks right in there.
But never fear! You can join me on a weekly bitchfest about them damned new-fangled gadgets and how they’re destroying the youth of today. Not like in MY day and age, when we had to walk to school for 14 miles through the snow, in AUGUST! Uphill both ways.
Whenever I’m worried about cheating, I make everyone give me their books or whatnot and collect them at the front of the class. You could do a similar thing with phones but you’d want to maybe label everyone’s phone (if it’s a big class).
In Australia we had to put our phones in our bags and leave our bags at the front of the classroom. If a phone so much as vibrated during the exam and the teacher figure out who’s it was, you got a 0 for the test.
[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]
In Australia we had to put our phones in our bags and leave our bags at the front of the classroom. If a phone so much as vibrated during the exam and the teacher figure out who’s it was, you got a 0 for the test.[/quote]
I do this with my students during exams and also have to with one of my classes on a daily basis as they are so bad with their phones. My students are sneaky, but I have a rule that if I see it being used during class, I put it on my desk. The second time it happens I send them with a referral note to the Student Services Dept. to get an official warning and talking to by administrators. If they get sent to Admin twice, they then get referred to the Dean and can possibly get expelled.
All of our students are getting iPads this week, so that is sure to create other issues…but I am happy at the prospect of a paperless classroom nonetheless. Will just have to keep a closer eye on everything.
This is one of the reasons I support bringing back floggings. We never had this problem when we had floggings in the classroom. Flog them I say; beat them black and blue
Easy.
Shoebox. Collect them(turned off) at the beginning of class. 99% of kids have phones. There should be 99% of the class’ phones as well. Bell goes give them back. Works like a charm.
If they complain about it then they have a choice. Put it in the box or don’t bring it.
Emergency? Call the school!
Done like dinner.
BUT
What gets me are those touch screen Nano MP5 watches. They sit and f*ck around with the screen. Technically it’s a watch but I am getting this close to putting those watches in the box as well.
[quote=“baberenglish”]Easy.
Shoebox. Collect them(turned off) at the beginning of class. 99% of kids have phones. There should be 99% of the class’ phones as well. Bell goes give them back. Works like a charm.
If they complain about it then they have a choice. Put it in the box or don’t bring it.
Emergency? Call the school!
Done like dinner.
BUT
What gets me are those touch screen Nano MP5 watches. They sit and f*ck around with the screen. Technically it’s a watch but I am getting this close to putting those watches in the box as well.[/quote]
Make a more general rule: any electronic device that is likely to distract you from class goes in the box. That way, you won’t have to worry about making up a million “what goes in the box?” rules
Oh. And nobody leaves until everyone has all their stuff back. (Prevent theft).
UAE. They made the decision last week and immediately sent a delegation to the US to procure 10,000 of them, for all of the students and Instructors at my university. Naturally they didn’t think anything through before they jumped, so I fully expect the whole idea to turn into a big, fat mess for most classes!
On a lighter note, it is not just my university doing this, it is ALL of the national universities in the UAE, so it might be a great time to buy stock in Apple!!!
It pisses me off big time when students check words on their i - phone dictionaries while i’m trying to elict or explain the meaning of the word. I teach ielts and and general english and when I see a student checking their phone, I grab a dictionary and plonk it in front of them. In fact, I might start a new policy and banning them from the classroom, unless the student is expecting a very important call.
[quote=“baberenglish”]Easy.
Shoebox. Collect them(turned off) at the beginning of class.[/quote]
Not so easy in the US where the kids will either lie that they don’t have one and will hide it, or they will just boldly refuse.
When one kid does it, the other kids join in.
And when the teacher tries to get the parents’ support, the parents jump on the teacher for not allowing their kids to have their phones in case of emergency.
And when the teacher tries to get the administrator’s support, the administrator jumps on the teacher for wasting his time knowing that the parents are against it.
This is probably the new norm now.
I was attending a graduate class a while back in the US.
All the students were looking at their laptops, and no one or few were looking at the lecturer.
For all the lecturer knows, he could have been talking to a blank wall.
But when I sat in the back of the room where I could see some of the screens, the students were looking up the stuff that the lecturer was talking about.
This is apparently how the newer generations are wired to learn.
I tell my students that one advantage of my classes is that they don’t need to bring a dictionary anymore. If they’re not clear about the meaning of a word or phrase, they just have to raise their hands, and I’ll give them the answer in terms that they can understand.
Luckily for me, I have power over my uni students, in that I can FAIL them at my whim. I walk around with my class list and if I see someone on their phone, texting shit, I make a mark next to their name. I tut-tut and shake my head. Works like a charm.
Ditto. The only issue these days is that smartphones often ARE useful to the students (dictionaries especially, but also Wikipedia and the like): five years ago I could just place a blanket ban on using cellphones at all, but I consider that too heavy-handed now.
We have this jammer at the university I work at…it’s a nice idea but not so nice in the case of an emergency or if you need to call the techies in when the Smartboards or air conditioning are out of order. They turn the jammer on intermittently, usually during ceremonies when the bigwigs are here giving a speech or something like that.
