11/14/25
Rich McCue Group Conversation: Phone Bans and Tech Access
Today in our tech class we had Rich McCue talk in our zoom lecture and he had us create questions and ideas about technology in education and he would group us up based on the question we chose and we had to discuss the topic and take notes with our group. In my group we got to discuss phone bans in school and their effectiveness and how access or lack of access to technology in school impact students learning. In our group we all agreed that high schools should not have the authority to ban phones in schools and we believe that students at that age should have control over their learning and decide whether or not they want to use school time to go on their phone, but the teachers should be able to decide if they want phones away during instructional time or have a phone wall to keep phones away during instructional times. Although for elementary schools we think that they should not bring phones to school at all as they are very young and most students do not have phones at that age, however for middle schools we think that there should be wifi blockers that blocks access to social media when connected to wifi as it can lead to less distraction for them during school time. We talked about the effectiveness of phone bans and found that from most of our experiences students only found ways to sneak around the policy, with wifi blockers they simply use their data or vpns to get around it. I think that phone use during instructional time is not beneficial for a students learning but i think there should be a different way to reduce screentime at school rather than to ban them all together. For tech access we believe that technology in schools is super beneficial for a students learning as they use it for research and learn how to use technology in a safe way. Comparing technology with books we see that using computers to do research is way more efficient compared to reading through a book to find information, it is way more time consuming and not efficient. Especially now in university our whole schooling is done on our laptops. This whole discussion has taught me the impact that technology has in our everyday life and how different it would be if we did not have access to it.