(WSVN) - It’s the last week of summer break for students attending public schools in South Florida, and the hardest adjustment may be obeying the no cell phone policy in class.
As children get ready to re-enter the classroom, many of them will be faced with newly implemented cell phone bans.
However, Associate Professor of Education Research David Marshall said it’s not all bad.
“Students are actually talking to one another, they’re reengaging socially. If you take two devices away, they have to talk to one another,” he said.
In May, Marshall and his team at Auburn University did a national study based that featured nearly 600 teachers on screen time in the classroom.
“Eighty-five percent of teachers say that there’s too much technology in the classroom and with regards to one of the technologies that’s been in the news a lot, cell phones,” said Marshall.
Marshall also found that most of all the teachers surveyed supported “no cell phone” policies whether they worked at schools where cell phone bans existed or not.
“It’s hard to get that that large of a share of the population to agree on anything, so when you have this many teachers telling us something, I think it’s important that we listen,” said Marshall.
He also advises teachers to reflect on their own use of technology in the classroom as well as they prepare their lesson plans.
“I mean, I think all schools just need to be asking a question, you know, does technology need to be in place to enhance learning for this particular learning objective? And the answer doesn’t necessarily need to always be yes,” said Marshall.
Cell phone bans will be in effect across Miami-Dade and Broward County Public Schools after a state law was passed in 2025 that banned cell phone use during instructional time unless permitted by a teacher.
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