The Future of Cell Phones

It' s hard for me to listen to Josh Allen's argument against cell phones in the classroom, when he completely dismisses the idea of children with Blackberrys. When I checked the publication date it made since it was written in 2007. Seeing how it is now 2009 and two years is a lot of time in the tech world, many things have obviously changed because more kids have Blackberrys and iPhones than adults it seems (at least the adults I socialize with). These days new cell phones act like laptop computers that fit in your pants pocket. Too be honest I actually quit reading Allen's article due to his lack of foresight. We all know that computers and phones are outdated within months of being released, so why wouldn't phones continue to evolve into minicomputers. We wouldn't ask our students to stop using their computer would we? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the use of phones in classroom for social communication, but rather what Liz Kolb describes as the ideal purposes of cell phones in school, "Cell phones can be audio recorders, digital video camcorders, still cameras, note-taking devices, calculation devices, scheduling and man- agement tools, phone conferencing devices, Internet researching tools, faxing and scanning devices, blog and Web page editors, or even audio assessment recorders" (Kolb, 2007, p. 9). The amount of uses and applications that phones have coupled with their small size and availability make them an ideal tool in a classroom. I don't think that I am quite ready to start creating cell phone based projects but that time isn't too far away. Give those that are behind the technology curve time to catch up (such as myself) and as phones continue to become more capable, it will be possible to turn the normal classroom into a computer lab just by asking our students to pull out their cell phones. *My phone policy will be strict in that they will only be allowed when prompted and will be taken away if they ring or cause a distraction.