School setting rules on gadgets

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- 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.

About 10 percent of the 600 East Dubuque students carry PDAs, said Joe Ambrosia, district 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."

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