UK teachers want mobile phones classified as ‘offensive weapons’
By Will Park on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 12:08 PM PST In Devices
A UK teaching union is pushing for mobile phone to be classified as “offensive weapons.” The move to ban mobile phones from schools was prompted by more than 100 cases of teachers being abused and bullied through the mobile pones. Teachers now have the power to confiscate the mobile phones on grounds of “cyberbullying.” Mobile phones have been used to secretly record teachers with malicious intent.
NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates is especially concerned about websites such as Ratemyteacher and Bebo, which are breeding grounds for false allegations and slander that can hurt teachers’ emotionally as well as professionally. Keates says that, “These sites are fed by pupils’ misuse of mobile phones. The time has come for mobiles in schools to be placed in the category of a potentially offensive weapon and action taken to prevent their use by pupils while on school premises. Regrettably, our evidence shows that some schools are still not taking these issues seriously.”
Is this problem isolated to the UK? If anything like this happened in US schools, I would hope that mobile phones would be banned immediately by a school’s administration – without the need to classify mobile phones as “offensive weapons.”
[Via: BBC]
