Does cell phone use in class affect a student's learning? Cell phones can be an asset in school by replacing other classroom materials. The materials that cell phones can replace are: dictionaries, timers, calculators and other objects that are usually used in the classroom. Students can improve their projects by using their cell phones to record data. Additionally, many websites can help students send responses to their teachers via text messages. But cell phones are also inappropriate in the classroom. Cell phones have the potential to make emergency situations worse than they normally would be. Students may take inappropriate photos of other students. They can also take photos of their tests for later lessons. More importantly, cell phones cause distractions for every student. While cell phones can save schools thousands of dollars, they continue to cause distractions during lessons and should not be allowed. One of the benefits of having cell phones in the classroom is that they replace many materials. “Students looking for definitions of new terms or answers to basic knowledge questions began texting questions to Google's SMS question service number and receiving immediate answers” ​​(Ferriter). Students are able to look up something on the Internet in less than five minutes instead of looking in a dictionary which would take more than ten minutes. “Using nothing more than the tools that most students brought to school every day, we had successfully replaced dictionaries” (Ferriter). More and more teachers are helping by allowing students to use their cell phones to take notes, create podcasts, and organize homework, but are careful to follow district policies (Trotter). Deleting your cell phone...... middle of paper......: 10. MasterFILE Premier. Network. February 26, 2014. The author, Andrew Trotter of Education Week, speaks with Rosemary Miller, a secondary school technology integration specialist in Buhler, Kansas, about introducing cell phones into the classroom. Miller says the district doesn't have computers for every child, but cell phones are always connected. Liz Kolb, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, also gives her opinion on using the best resources available. There are sites where teachers can post quizzes and students can respond via text. The author's logical appeal is when he talks about the use of cell phones on school trips. To bolster the point, the author states, “Middle and high schools have been the leading dabblers in cell phone learning experiments, but some elementary schools are getting their feet wet, too.”