Cell phones in CLASS? yes please.

Mr. Brown stands at the front of the room giving his lecture on the stock market crash to the room full of tenth graders. In the third row, Johnny is quickly glancing up and down at his lap. Mr. Brown notices this and calls on Johnny to answer a question. It becomes clear Johnny has no idea what he was asking. Is the cell phone the problem?
In my experience and in the experience of many teachers, particularly those who work at the Skills Center, in the Evergreen school district, cell phones are absolutely not a problem. What seems to work for them is to clearly define what acceptable and unacceptable phone uses are and to establish a series of consequences that relate to unacceptable use. In the research that has been conducted at The Skills Center, 98 per cent of the calls and texts a student receives are from their parents. Also, most, if not all of these communications are about the logistics of safely transporting the student home, or tracking their attendance and school work. They also found that if a student gets a message or call from home during class, they are significantly distracted by it, and will actually perform worse than if they are permitted to reasonably address the call or message. This is not unlike what we as adults experience while on the job, or at any other time in our hectic day. The key is to teach students to be respectful and responsible with their phones.
Let's look at Johnny from the above example. What if he is actually using his phone to take notes? It is better for some students to compile their notes digitally (texts, cell phone photos of the white board, etc.) than to sit and try to write them on paper. Isn't the real importance here that Johnny is engaged and doing what he needs to do for class? In the point counter point article "Should Cell Phones Be Banned From The Classroom?", Liz Kolb makes some strong points against banning them. To me, her statement, "...students do not even need to bring the cell phone in to the classroom to use it as a learning tool. They can use them for homework or on class Field trips." makes a strong case for not banning them as some kind of evil device, destined to corrupt learning, but shows that they can be a reasonable part of our lives.