Confiscating Cell Phones

Will Richardson refers to a New York Times article that describes the confiscation of hundreds of cell phones at a school in metro-New York.

Will certainly thinks that students should be allowed access to cell phones. One of his readers commented that if students are allowed to bring cell phones to school it raises a number of non-technological questions such as theft possibilities. I wrote this comment in response to her:

I totally hear what you are saying with regards to theft. But, the other day I bought a video camera for vodcasting and I was shocked that the whole thing cost me less than $110. I started thinking that schools could purchase collections of video cameras. What would be the posibility of working with cell phone companies to have them build phones specifically for schools. Perhaps the teacher could control the functions on the set of phones from a distance. I'd imagine that the camera and IM could come in very handy at numerous points throughout the curriculum. I'd also imagine that the technology easily exists for something like this. The neat part of this would be that students would still have access to the phones in case of emergencies and they wouldn't even need to bring their own phone in. The phones could be numbered in such a way that if a student walks off with a phone the teacher could just disable it. I'm just thinking aloud. I hope that it's OK that I'm sending this to you. If my name does not come up it is andrew.pass