PALO ALTO, California (AP) -- In the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto High
School junior Anna Luskin freely uses her cell phone in between classes.
Senior Sean Slattery taps notes into his personal digital assistant as
his teachers give lectures.
And like many other students, senior Stav Raz has memorized her cell
phone keypad so she doesn't even have to look at it while quietly
messaging friends during class.
For better or worse, handheld devices and laptops are now seen as
essential back-to-school supplies for students across America. And many
schools have only begun to weigh their educational benefits against
their potential for text messaging, photo swapping, cheating and
chatting.
Nearly a third of American teenagers now carry cell phones. An
estimated 7 percent of school districts even provide some students with
handheld computers -- known as PDAs -- thanks in many cases to corporate
grants, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Students who bring their own PDAs to school today mostly use them as
organizers and notepads. But many newer models have wireless Internet
access, making it ever more difficult for teachers to detect students
exchanging gossipy notes or test answers.
If schools haven't addressed the PDA issue yet, "it's something
they'll have to wrestle with in the next couple of years as students
bring more of these kind of gadgets to schools," said John Bailey,
director of education technology for the Department of Education.
Handheld devices remain verboten in most classrooms, but that doesn't
mean students aren't quietly tapping away under their desks.
Palo Alto High is ahead of the curve and an exception. Its school
board updated its computer policies in June to include PDAs, basically
allowing their use as long as they don't interfere with class.
"They're common-sense restrictions," said Chuck Merritt, Palo Alto
High's assistant vice principal.
When Slattery, the Palo Alto senior, first got his PDA a year ago,
teachers told him to put it away whenever they caught him playing games
on it. Now, he says he uses it only for taking notes and keeping track
of assignments.
He knows he is lucky, because most other schools in the high-tech
region and elsewhere aren't so lenient.
"It's not that we discourage technology here, but we want the kids to
not be distracted either," said Alice Pearson, an English teacher at
East Dubuque High School in Illinois. Pearson uses a Palm PDA herself to
stay organized.
About 10 percent of the 600 East Dubuque students carry PDAs, said
Joe Ambrosia, the district's technology coordinator.
Though no formal policy exists, teachers there generally apply the
same rules that they have for computers: no exchange of information
between devices, and no personal e-mail or chatting unless it's part of
a class exercise.
When East Dubuque does consider a PDA policy, Ambrosia said he'll
want to ban the combination cell phone-PDA models.
"It shouldn't be so easy to have all these other functions at their
fingertips," he said. "It's hard enough to keep a young teenager on
task."
California and Illinois are among only a handful of states that have
lifted campus bans of cell phones and pagers, which date back to the
1980s when the devices were considered the tools of drug dealers, not of
soccer moms and their kids.
A few states now let school districts set their own cell phone
policies. Some have decided to keep bans in place; others restrict usage
to before or after school.
Schools are adapting in other ways, too.
Some teachers configure student seats in a U-shape instead of rows,
for easier monitoring of computer screens. They set rules on when laptop
screens can be up or down. They listen for keyboard taps, knowing that
if students are typing a mile a minute during a lecture, they're
probably messaging someone instead of listening.
And cell phones that ring in class are often confiscated until
school's over.
Schools also have strict rules for when students can use their
powerful graphing calculators, which are often required for advanced
math classes and achievement tests. Newer graphing calculators have
better memory, creating more possibilities for cheating.
In addition, vendors of educational software have responded to the
cheating potential -- for instance, the Scantron Corp. makes quiz
programs for PDAs that automatically disable the device's infrared
beaming function.
Still, policing the use of these devices "is a new skill in terms of
teachers knowing what to do," said Cari Vaeth, principal of Independence
High School in San Jose, which issued laptops last year to the entire
class of 1,000 sophomores.
Social studies classes at Independence High are also switching to
e-books instead of regular textbooks.
Even so, despite some parental protests, cell phones and mobile
communicators remain banned from campus.
"Cell phones are a huge distraction, so we've continued to stay with
the ban," Vaeth said. "And in an emergency, we could get the student
from the classroom just like we always have."