The Decision To Allow Students To Use Cellphones In School

According to Oxford Dictionaries (2019), smartphone is a mobile phone that powers similarly to a computer, as it has advanced functions such as accessing the Internet online, touchscreen interface, launching digital applications with its own operating system, and many more. In today’s era, it is almost certain to see people in the streets using their smartphones. The above point is certain as even secondary level students today are able to get their hands on smartphone at such a young age. However, due to this phenomena, people started to question whether secondary level students should be allowed to use smartphone in school. Despite the general perception of smartphone being a distraction for secondary level students in school, they should be allowed to use smartphone in school.

Firstly, as smartphone has slowly integrated into our daily lives, secondary level students can use smartphones for group discussions. Based on a review done by Sophie Heizer (2018), five experts were asked to give their opinions on the usage of mobile phones among secondary level students. Four of them think that allowing students to use smartphone can improve of learning in various aspects. Students can fully utilize smartphones during group discussions. Functions such as texting, voice calling and video calling the members are very useful when students are having group discussion. This will ease the process of students communicating with their group members as they are just a click away to see or talk with each other virtually without any hassles. The above functions can also be integrated into more advanced functions of smartphones as it will be much convenient when the students are doing project. Members can send multimedia such as photos of notes took in lessons, documents and videos related to the project through WhatsApp (WhatsApp, 2019). Students will be able to save up a lot of time as they can just settle the handling of documents and data among the group members. Therefore, smartphones can help secondary level students greatly for group discussions.

Other than that, with the latest mobile technology, smartphone is a good and effective media to replace textbooks during lessons. Majority of secondary level students will agree because they tend to be more interested to learn new things through modern technologies as digital textbooks in smartphone are more interactive and vivid, rather than reading traditional and dull textbooks. Moodle is an e-learning platform that can be used for e-learning as educators and lecturers share course subjects on the private websites they create. Today, there are already more 173 million users including secondary level students worldwide using this platform (Moodle, 2019). In addition, the role of smartphone as today’s frontier media for education has been proven by the Finnish National Core Curriculum as high school students in Finland are allowed to use their smartphones in class whether participating topics in class or collaborating with classmates and teachers during the lesson (Dr. Keijo Sipilä, 2018). By allowing students to use smartphone as an education tool, students are able to interact with different type of media and be an up to date student with the usage of technology. This is why smartphone will be a very effective media to replace textbooks.

Even though there are benefits for using smartphone in secondary level students, the Ministry of Education Malaysia (2009), bans students from using their smartphones in school compound and students are informed to use public payphones if they want to make a phone call. Until today this rule is still effective and haven’t been lifted. This shows that students can only use public payphones or teacher's phone in order to make phone call. But this can’t be use when it comes to emergency situations. Furthermore, public payphones require frequent maintenance and money to use it. Frequent maintenance is needed because there are many students who use the public payphones to make phone call since it is the only way other than finding teachers. Public payphones can also be spoiled due to the vandalism and damages from students in the school. This made the students unable to make a phone call because the pay phones were spoiled. As Yip Yoke Teng (2017), reported that there are 30,000 to 40,000 payphones in the Malaysia, but most of them are dysfunctional or beyond repair. By allowing students use smartphones in school, the public payphones issues can be resolved.

Thus, in our opinion, we think that secondary students should be allowed to use smartphones in school for education purpose and emergency situations because using them in school can help in group discussions, replacing the textbooks, and act as a better alternative to school payphones during emergency. With the proper guidance from parents and teachers we believe that allowing secondary level students to use smartphones in school bring more pros than cons to the students and society.