Honestly, it sounds like you're just fishing for reasons to ban phones because you personally don't like them and are unable to respect students as people.
Not sure what you mean about the reliability - the apps are more reliable than the previous methods like paper tickets. I don't really want to go back to standing in endless queues.
And no, these apps don't have nearly unlimited access to my private information, not sure where you got that idea. They have access to some of my personal information that I gave them, but they always had that access - the public transport app has the same information that I had to fill out in a paper form when buying a yearly pass, for example. And of course, my email provider has access to my email - news at 11.
Here in EU we have GDPR and DSA, that's enough adversarial review for me.
Why not bring it in? I don't understand why they should behave as if they lived in 19th century. They're people living in 21st century, making full use of new technology - nothing wrong about that.
It's bullshit to demand they have to go home to get their phone before they go on with their day after school - not to mention they use the phones before school too. My siblings buy breakfast and lunch with the virtual payment cards (from our parent's Revolut) they have in the phone.
Even their public transit tickets are apps - it's a QR code, and because the transit company wants to reduce staff, you pay 20% less if you buy tickets in the app. Will the school reimburse the additional 20% they caused them to pay? I guess not, right.
And remember Covid? Here in Europe the vaccination/test pass is an app too, and they needed it to get into the school building, the cafeteria, the public transit etc. Soon the ID and driver's licence will be apps as well.
The school itself is sending them homework and grades into an app, btw. It has web access, sure - but they access web on their phones. It's bullshit to make them unable to check their grades or homework assignments during schooltime.
Sure, they could go back to 19th century life with paper calendars, letters, money and transit tickets. But their quality of life would go significantly down. Schools have no right to demand that. Nobody has.
And as I said, school day is not 100% class time. What they do during breaks is their own business.
> Most schools in EU just bans cellphone usage during school hours either by taking it away or barred from bringing it in and it's just effective.
No, they don't. In my state it's very wrong to touch the phone - could be a fine and suspension (for the teacher/school employee) or even a crime, depending on what they did.
The school can demand it's turned off during class time (doesn't apply to breaks) but they have no way to verify or enforce. They can write a teacher's note in case of a disruption or take the student out of the class in serious cases, but they can't touch the phone.
Currently, the trend here is to integrate smartphones into the lessons. Make students use Google search, YouTube, Wikipedia, ChatGPT and other tools.
There doesn't need to be any advantage. They're not causing any disruptions - nobody should be telling them where to put their property.
A phone contains private photos and conversations, has authorized access to email, chat and (in other cases) social media accounts, it's a second authentication factor, it has payment cards, saved passwords, browser history, potentially health data (for example, period or medication notification app) and other data that they might not want anybody else to access, or could even cause them problems if the wrong person saw some of it (which doesn't mean it'd be something illegal or inappropriate - but some teachers have really weird ideas about how the life of a student should look).
It's perfectly understandable they want to have it under their own sight and control. Touching it without permission is unacceptable.
I have seen kids steal stuff from the teacher's desk/other school property when I still went to school - one kid even stole a RAM stick from a school computer right during class. I would never trust the school's ability to keep my phone secure.
Also - the school day is not 100% class time, there are breaks in between. What they do during breaks is their own business.
A phone contains private photos, conversations, has authorized access to email, chat and social media accounts, it's a second authentication factor, it has payment cards, saved passwords, browser history, potentially health data (for example, period tracker and medication notification app) and other data that they might not want anybody else to access, or could even cause them problems if the wrong person saw some of (which doesn't mean it'd be something illegal or inappropriate - but some teachers have really weird ideas about how the life of a student should look).
Touching it without permission is unacceptable. Ask the student to put it away, pull them out of the class if they don't - but don't touch the phone.
There is a lot to debate. I don't agree with this "addiction" argument at all. My siblings (much younger, school age) don't have social media by their own volition. Apparently they're immune to this addiction - or perhaps it's not really addiction, but something different.
Taking away their phones because others can't handle themselves is wrong.
The device might be legally obtainable but using it in a way that affects the public (which includes the students) is a serious crime anywhere in EU. I'd guess it's the same in the US.
You said that if there is a legitimate need they can call the school office or have the office call the parents - so I'd expect the office to handle it.
For myself it was mostly that parents could simply call me 5 minutes before they picked me up for my dentist appointment (which I had at least monthly for 7 years due to having braces) instead of me waiting somewhere for who knows how long because there was a traffic jam (and missing more schooltime than necessary).
They could simply call me/send me a SMS and ask me to pick up my younger siblings when they had unexpected work and couldn't make it in time - but since they respected me as a person, I had to confirm that I will do it and don't have other plans. Obviously, if I saw the question only after school that'd be way too late and they would have to force me into it instead of simply asking the grandparents if I said I can't.
Because why the hell shouldn't we use modern technology if it's available to us? Thanks to it we were flexible, and we enjoyed it.
Yeah, I also used the phone during class. Because the lessons were shit. Though we had a few very engaging teachers and even though I had zero interest in their subjects, I never used phone in their class.
Schools have to improve, taking phones away is just bandaging the symptoms.
As a student (over a decade ago) I had hundreds - maybe even thousands over the 13 years of education, actually - of phone calls with my parents, siblings, grandparents, uncle, friends etc about various stuff I was doing after school, during school (and sometimes instead of school).
I'm sure the school office would've loved to handle all the calls for us, lol.
It's a worldwide thing. I'm in a country neighboring Germany and it's perfectly normal that everybody has a smartphone. The schools have policies that it has to be turned off but they can't touch the phone at all.
You have no idea what site is it. Perhaps it's an interactive game or a questionnaire. POSTing that data to a server is much worse than running some clientside code. Your post is not productive at all.
But that's missing the point again! If you do that, you will never reach the release with your perfect app because you wasted that time and effort on making an unusable mockup and there might be no money left to do the actual app. Those who make a mockup that can actually be used release it and that becomes the business.