Mobile Phones Effects

INTRODUCTION

Many kids these days have cell phones. You often see teenagers talking on their phones, or, just as often, texting. It became a part of everyday life, and a part of our society. Many teenagers and pre-teens get cell phones as early as possible as, sometimes younger than age 12. It is encouraged socially, especially among teenagers, to have a phone, and many teenagers get phones just because of peer pressure. Cell phones can be very useful, for communication between kids and parents, and can be very important in emergencies. But cell phones can also be used for less important reasons, such as excessive amounts of texting. One big issue concerning cell phones and teenagers is the use of cell phones in school. Many teenagers believe that cell phones should be allowed in school, during class.

Cell phones could also provide a means of cheating on tests. Almost all cell phones have texting, and kids have become good at texting without getting caught. It would be easy for kids to text each other the answers to tests during testing sessions if everyone is allowed to use their phone during class. If teachers ask what students are doing, they can just say that they are texting their mom. Now, some might say that kids are more honest than that, but they are wrong.

Many schools do not allow students to use cell phones in school because it disrupts the learning process. Most students use cell phones irresponsibly. They use cell phones to talk to their friends during class time. They also use their cell phone to text message or pass on answer to tests, homework, and other class information. Students also use the calculator and camera features in the class as well, which is another disruption to learning.

These all are known problems that cell phones cause or worsen, and these problems would very likely get more serious if cell phones were allowed in school. Despite what many teenagers argue, allowing cell phones during school would not be a good idea because of distraction to students and teachers, a new and easy way of cheating on tests, and enhanced social problems, including loss of social skills.

All in all, schools will be a better learning environment and better prepare students for life in the outside world if cell phones are continued to be banned during the school days.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

1. What is the usage of mobile phones?

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this gadget?

3. How does it make our lives easier?

SCOPE AND DELIMITATION

This study will only focus to the usage of cell phone during class hours. This will tell the advantages and disadvantages of cell phones. This study will also give surveys about the usage of the said gadget. But the surveys and other works were exclusively conducted in THAP high school department only.

SIGNIFICANT OF THE STUDY

The content of this study will tell us the rate of students who are using cell phones during class hours. In that case we will know what to do, if we will let it or prevent it. Aside from the previous statement, this study contains advantages and disadvantages of the said gadget above. This study will benefit the teacher and students who use the mentioned gadget, not just them but also the readers who read and will read this study will be quite informed of these important statements which may affects their daily living. This may also back up the next researchers of this study.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

• Advantages- any state, circumstance, opportunity, or means specially favourable to success, interests period

• Communication- the imparting of or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.

• Democratize- to make or become democratic.

• Disadvantages- the state or an instance of being in an unfavourable circumstance or condition.

• Diversity- a point of difference

• Enhance- to rise to the higher degree; intensify; magnify.

• Illicit- not legally permitted or authorized

• Mobile phones- a device that can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link while moving around a wide geographic area

• Poll- the place where the votes are taken

• Pre-teens—about to become a teen ager

• Predator- any organism that exist by preying upon other organism

• Proficiency- the state of being skilled.

• Theft- the act of stealing

• Verbatim- an exactly the same words; word for word

• Wi-Fi- a popular technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data wirelessly (using radio waves) over a computer network

• Worsen- to or become worse.

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Surprising field studies suggest cell phones could be effective learning tools

Guest blogger Marie Bjerede is Vice President of Wireless Education Technology at Qualcomm, Inc., where she focuses on addressing the technical, economic, social, and systemic challenges to enabling every student to gain the advantages afforded those who have 24/7 mobile broadband access.

In most schools, cell phones are checked at the door — or at best powered off during school hours in a tacit “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding between students and administrators. This wide-spread technology ban is a response to real concerns: if kids have unfettered instant access to the Internet at school, how do we keep them safe, how do we keep out inappropriate content, how do we prevent real-time cyber bullying, how do we even keep their attention in class when competing with messaging, gaming, and surfing?At the same time, though, there is a growing sense among education thought leaders and policy leaders that not only are cell phones here to stay but there seems to be interesting potential to use these small, connected computers that so many students already have. I’ve been insanely fortunate over the past year to work closely with Wireless Reach (Qualcomm’s strategic social initiative) and real innovators in education who are finding that cell phones in classrooms don’t have to be a danger or a distraction but, in fact, can help kids learn in some surprising ways.

During the 2007-2008 school year, Wireless Reach began funding Project K-Nect, a pilot project in rural North Carolina where high school students received supplemental algebra problem sets on smart phones (the phones were provided by the project). The outcomes are promising — classes using the smart phones have consistently achieved significantly higher proficiency rates on their end of course exams.

Now, the population is small (on the order of 150 kids) and the make-up is essentially what researchers call a “convenience sample.” It was selected from a population of kids that: largely qualified for free and reduced lunch; didn’t have home Internet; and had low math proficiency. It was not balanced with a formally designed control group. There was self-selection on the part of the participating teachers — they are extremely motivated — but the results are consistent and startling. Overall, proficiency rates increased by 30 percent. In the best case, one class using the devices had 50 percent more kids finishing the year proficient than a class learning the same material from the same teacher during the same school year, but without the cell phones.

So what’s so different about delivering problem sets on a cell phone instead of a textbook? The first obvious answer is that the cell phone version is multi-media. The Project K-Nect problem sets begin with a Flash video visually demonstrating the problem — you could theorize that this context prepares the student to understand the subsequent text-based problem better. You could also theorize that watching a Flash animation is more engaging (or just plain fun) and so more likely to keep students’ attention.

Another difference is that digital content is personalized. In this case, that just means that different students get the same problem (how long will it take a space ship to catch up with a space probe?) but with different numbers plugged in (the velocity might be given as 40,000 mph for one student and 37,500 mph for another). The result is that students can’t simply compare answers – they need to compare solutions. “How did you get that” replaces “what did you get?”A third difference is that, unlike the traditional practice where each student works on textbook problems in isolation, the learning environment in Project K-Nect is participative. Students are asked to record their solutions on a shared blog and are encouraged to both post and comment. Over time, a learning community has emerged that crosses classrooms and schools and adds the kind of human interaction that an isolated, individual drill (be it textbook or digital) lacks and that a single teacher is unlikely to have the bandwidth to provide to each student

A final observation is that having a digitally mediated component to the learning environment can be surprisingly inclusive. As teachers in Project K-Nect began to experiment with using the blogs and instant messaging for discussing math in the classroom, an unexpected (to us) dynamic emerged. It turns out that many kids who don’t like speaking up in class are completely comfortable speaking up online. Students who don’t like to raise their hands use the devices to ask questions or participate in collaborative problem solving. There appears to be something democratizing about having a “back channel” as part of the learning environment.

So far all these distinctions are not unique to cell phones but common to any personal computing solution. A Wi-Fi-equipped netbook at every desk could readily provide the same kind of differentiation from a lecture-and-textbook based traditional classroom. But taking the next step from computer labs or laptops at school to a personal, connected device changes the game. Beyond just computing in the classroom, cell phones give the students in Project K-Nect access to the Internet and their learning communities 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, whether they are at school, at home, on the bus, at after-school activities, or in the case of one chronically ill student, at the hospital.

Back when I was in school, I remember math learning went something like this:

• Sit in a lecture and take notes furiously — verbatim, if possible

• The night before homework is due, try to reverse engineer how to solve problems from the now cryptic notes

• Find examples that look like the problem at hand

• Plug in numbers from the given problem

• Hope

Because the students in Project K-Nect have 24/7 mobile broadband, that dynamic has changed for them. When a student sits down to work on problems and gets stuck, she can post a question or just a general plea for help to the shared blog. Soon, several classmates will reply with help and encouragement. Students who might otherwise give up can get just-in-time support to help them be successful while the students who are providing the help get the reinforcement and deeper understanding that comes from teaching.

Teachers from the pilot also tell me that their instruction has changed since they started using cell phones in class. I had a chance to see one teacher give her students a simple bingo game to play on the phone that involved solving a number of algebra problems. She told me that her kids had far more patience for, and interest in, working problems as quickly and accurately as possible when it was part of a digital game rather than performing the same drill using worksheets.

I’ve seen another teacher use Poll Everywhere software with the students to check on their understanding during a lecture. The teacher posed a math problem, the students texted their replies to the Poll Everywhere site, and a pie chart showing the distribution of answers was instantly projected at the front of the class, giving the teacher a chance to clear up any misconceptions before moving on.

Much of the teaching has also shifted to problem-based learning. I was fascinated to see an example of this on one visit. The students worked in groups to develop a public service announcement describing the dangers of compound interest and credit card debt. They then made a video of their commercial using their cell phones and posted it to the shared blog. Not

only did they learn by discussing and debating as a team how best to communicate compound interest, but they then had the resulting video to refer to when it came time to review for the test. In fact, they had everyone’s videos at their fingertips via their cell phone browsers. If one team’s explanation didn’t kindle the “aha” moment, another one just might. Once again, the connected learning community had a significant and unanticipated impact on these students.

As for the issues of safety and appropriate use of the Internet, each student in the pilot has signed an acceptable use policy outlining their responsibilities as cell phone users at school. Soti’s MobiControl software, which allows the teachers to interact with each student’s cell phone, also allows them to monitor use and apply standard classroom discipline techniques for inappropriate behavior in the virtual world — just as they manage behavior in physical hallways and on campus grounds. Not surprisingly, after some initial testing of the boundaries, a culture of responsible use quickly evolved among the students.

Finally, what about messaging, gaming, and surfing in class? In the Project K-Nect classrooms, students don’t use these to play virtual hooky, but they do use them regularly for learning. In the classrooms I’ve had a chance to see, the students are far too busy participating to tune out. Of all the expected and unexpected outcomes of this project, I find the way that cell phones have facilitated the social aspects of learning to be one of the most intriguing.

People get selfish when on their phones

Two studies out of the University of Maryland appear to confirm a long-held suspicion about cellphone use: people get selfish when they’re on their phones.

According to a press release, researchers at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business found that when people are using or thinking about their phones they are less likely to engage in prosocial behavior. The study notes that prosocial behavior is characterized as “action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole.”

In the experiment, college students were asked how likely they were to volunteer at a charity after using either Facebook or a cellphone without access to Facebook. After three minutes, they were asked how likely they were to volunteer at a charity organization. Participants who had used their phones were less likely to say they would volunteer than those who had browsed Facebook immediately before.

In a pretest people had reported feeling more connected to others when using their cellphones than when using Facebook, and that finding coupled with the fact that people were less likely to volunteer after using their phones lead the researchers to conclude that there was a correlation between level of connectedness and willingness to volunteer, i.e. the more connected to others people feel, the less likely they are to volunteer.

“The cellphone directly evokes feelings of connectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong,” the studies’ authors write in a working paper titled “The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.”

According to marketing professor Rosellina Ferraro, a co-author of the report who spoke with The Huffington Post, the cellphone didn’t even need to be present to produce these results.

In a second study participants were asked to draw a picture of either their TV or their cellphone and to think about how they used whichever gadget they were drawing. Afterwards, the cellphone group was less engaged than the TV group in a problem-solving task, even though all participants knew that completion of the task meant money was being donated to charity.

It’s important to note that since this is a working study these findings have not been published or peer-reviewed. According to the University of Maryland’s student newspaper, The Diamond, the study will not be published until additional follow-up research has been conducted on the more general effects of cellphone use on how people act in social situations.

CAHPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

RESEARCH DESIGN

We do this study by conducting survey to our co-schoolmates and also with help of every member of our group and some teachers.

RESEARCH LOCALE

The study was conducted in our school, The Heritage Academy of the Philippines.

RESEARCH INSTRUMENT

In this study we’ve use computers to type, save, edit, and for some search purposes. We’ve also use our critical thinking to add up those things that lacks. Other than that we need to use some respondents or interviewees to prove our study because as they said theories/study without evidences are/is nonsense.

RESPONDENCE

The following names are the selected students we had interview recently

Grade 7 students

• Antonnete Camay

• Ivan Alcala

• Jonathan Cordero

2nd year students

• Gabriel

• Sheryn Pagco

• Nissi Villa

3rd year students

• Carlo Lapiz

• Jandale

• Apple

4th year students

• Nathaniel Arellano

• Karel Joyce Pepaña

• Jayvee Garbonera

RESEARCH PROCEDURE

The very first thing we’ve done is know what concept we will going to have in this study. After we knew the concept we’ve decided to put a title which may fit to the concept we’ve choose. Then we began to make the study. First of all we need to make an introduction which every study has. Since we already have introduction the next thing is to find the problem that must be answered at last. And if there’s problem, there must an educated guess or best known as hypothesis which will be prove or disprove after conducting this study. Of course to know if the hypothesis is true, we need to conduct experimentation. In this case we’ll need respondents to answer some questions or shall we say those frequently asked questions. After this we’ll need to observe to know the best answer or the nearest answer to the problem. And then we’ll give the conclusion to the questions and also some recommendations.

CHAPTER 4

PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS

Our thesis is all about using cell phone during class hours. In using cellphone there are advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of using cell phone is to communicate our love ones that is far away from us and to text our parents if there is emergencies in school. The disadvantages of using cell phone during class hours is destructing our concentration in listening to our lesson conduct by our teachers and to cheat during test sessions. We conduct this thesis to help the students who is using cell phone during class hour to enlighten their minds that using cell phone during class can disrupts our learning skills. Aside from this, we’ve conduct a survey about how many students have cellphone/s and how many students uses their cellphones during class hours. This survey results the pie graph below

 90% 10%

And the other survey result is almost 98% of the students that has cellphones uses it during class hours. It means most of the class is using their cellphones (with their own purposes) while teachers is teaching in front.

Now, let’s discuss some more advantages of using cellphones. Cell phones are not allowed in most high schools. The policy regarding cell phones differs in most schools. Some schools do not allow students to use their cell phone at any point during the day, whether or not they are in school hours. Some schools allow students to use their phones before and after school, but once the school day has begun, they are not allowed out. Some schools allow cell phones to be used during lunchtime and in between classes.

Most teachers will most likely tell you that there is nothing positive about students using their cell phones during class time, and most people would agree, using the cell phones when they are not in class is completely different. There can be good that can come of students being allowed to use their cell phones during school hours, of course, they will most likely never be able to use them during class time.

Parents can keep in touch with their children during school. Sending them a text message or leaving them a voice mail when they need to tell them something that cannot wait until the end of the school day. Students can also contact their parents when they have forgotten something at home or have forgotten to tell them something. Students can also reach their friends to ask them a question about the homework if they missed an assignment or if they need notes.

In case there is an emergency (such as a school shooting), which everyone hopes will never happen at their child’s school, a parent can easily be reached. Students with cell phones can reach their parents easily if something goes wrong at school, instead of all lining up to used the same phone, which could take hours depending on how many students there are. If there is an emergency, it is very important that students be able to reach a parent to let them know what is happening.

If a student has a medical problem, they can reach their parents if they do not want to go to the school nurse. If the student is in a position where they cannot get help from someone at school, they have their phone to contact the appropriate people such as the police or the hospital.

Cell phones are can be put on silence or vibrate if they are on, which does not cause a distraction if they are to ring. Students can make it so that their phones will not cause any disruptions during class and they still have access to them if they need it later on during the day. If the cell phone does not make any noise and the student is not using them during class time, there is no problem.

A cell phone is a very useful thing for someone to have. There are many benefits to having cell phones in schools, as long as the cell phones are not being used when students are in their classes. If students are at lunch or they are in between classes, the cell phone does not disrupt people who are trying to learn, and should not be a problem to anyone else.

Of course if there’s an advantage there always disadvantage so lets discuss it now. Six Potential Problem With Cell Phones in School

There are many arguments against allowing cell phones in the classroom.

Six of the most frequently cited arguments against mobile phones in school are:

1. Distractions

When a child is in school, his or her purpose there is to learn. Young people can be easily distracted from their studies – and having easy access to a mobile phone during class can make it easier for them to lose focus. If they become bored with the class material, it doesn’t take much for them to take their cell phone to play some games or to check their newsfeed on Facebook or Twitter. How can you expect a child or teen to absorb the knowledge they need to learn if they’re not even paying attention?

2. Cheating

Obviously, kids won’t be able to take out their cell phones and talk to one another in the classroom during an exam, but the concept of “passing notes” has stepped into the age of technology, thanks to text messaging. Texts can be sent quite discreetly while in the classroom. Taking it one step further, a student can excuse himself to go to the washroom, only to use that time to send text messages and leave voice mails.

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It’s also important to bear in mind that cell phones are advancing and improving faster than ever. Smartphones can surf the Web, providing high-tech ways for students to look for test answers online. Some models have advanced calculators, and depending on the software, may even be able to run custom applications that can contribute to academic dishonesty. The possibilities for cheating and copying are literally limitless when students have access to cell phones in class.

3. Theft

Young people can be very competitive, fighting for popularity among their peer group. This can manifest itself into stealing if a particular individual brings an especially expensive cell phone to school. The last thing you want to do is to tempt the would-be thieves by sending your child to school with a piece of equipment that make him or her a target. Lockers are more likely to be broken into, for example, if they know there is something of value in there.

4. Illicit Pictures

Kids will be kids, so with hormones raging during their school days, there is a distinct possibility that some students may take pictures that they shouldn’t be taking. Given that nearly every cell phone these days has a built-in digital camera, it becomes too easy to take a picture of someone without the person even noticing. These photos are also easily uploaded and shared over the Internet. Can you imagine the uproar if pictures were to arise of girls in the dressing room or boys in the locker room?

5. Socioeconomic Diversity

Cell phones can easily become seen as status symbols among students. In some schools, it is the more privileged kids that own cell phones or that have the latest phone on the market. This can lead to envy and cause socioeconomic diversity among students. Those with lower-end phones or no phones at all often become jealous and resentful. Those with the higher-end phones can show them off and look down on those who don’t have the latest phone.

6. Target for Predators

Many students use the internet or access social media sites without teacher or parent supervision. These students can be targeted by predators. Predators lurk in chat rooms, on social media sites and other websites that are of interest to students. With the use of smartphones and other devices, it can be hard to monitor a student’s online activity

CHAPTER 5

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

In our thesis we’ve learned so many things like cell phone has disadvantage and advantage. The advantage of using cell phone is to help to communicate to parents if there are emergencies. It also help us to text our love ones that is in the other countries and far away from us. The disadvantage of using cell phones is to cheat and to destruct our concentration during class hours.

CONCLUSION

We conclude that almost everybody is tempted to use this gadget (cell phone) although this may help us to communicate to our love ones, friends or classmates if there are emergencies, it also has disadvantages. The some of its disadvantage is to tempt the student to put answer key in their mobile phone to cheat and to share the answers using this kind of gadget during the test sessions. It may also disrupt their learning skills because there focus is on the cell phone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

www.sciencebuddies.com

www.infoplease.com

www.cellphonesafety.org

technology.inquirer.net

www.google.com.ph

21st Century Universal Encyclopedia, Regency publishing, Sydney

The Cell Phone: Anthropology of Communication, Heather Horst, Daniel Miller

Cell phone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything, Paul Levinson

The mobile connection: the cell phones impact in the society, Rich Ling