Be SMART with Your Phone-Cell Phone Safety Lesson Plan

 Subject: Cell Phone Safety
Cell Phone Tools Used: Poll Everywhere, tool of students' choice, such as Flikr or Voki
Preparation: Go to www.polleverywhere.com and create a poll with the questions below and have the polleverywhere number and text in codes ready to provide to students.  
Lesson Overview:  Students will learn risks and share safety tips for cell phones.Lesson Description:  Set up a poll (yes/no) with Poll Everywhere that asks students the following questions:

• Have you ever received a call or a text message from a stranger?
• Have you have ever received a call or text message that bullied you?
• Have you have ever received a call or text message that was sexual?  

Once you have your answers you can share the tips to combat these types of unsafe situations.  The tips can be generated from the group using a free text poll on Poll Everywhere that asks students to share safety tips to prevent/handle these unsafe situations.  Safety tips should be similar to:

• Do not answer calls or read text messages from strangers.
• Block unknown numbers. 
• Share with adults when messages are harmful. 
• Make good choices about what messages to send. 
• Only take appropriate pictures or send appropriate messages. 
• Only save appropriate pictures. 

When all students have had a chance to share, read through the results and as a group come up with the top suggestions. Allow students individually or in groups to use their cell phone tool of choice to create a safety tip for cell phone presentation that can be shared with others (such as with younger kids).  Some suggestions for tools would be create a podcast, a Flickr slideshow, a "forward" text message that could be sent around school, or a Voki explaining the safety tips.

How the Use of Cell Phones Enriches This Lesson:

• The use of the cell phone tools demonstrates for students how, with good choices, cell phones can be used for educational purposes as well as social ones.
• Using an actual phone to practice using the phone in a safe way makes the lesson more real to students.

NETS-S Standards Addressed:

• Creativity and Innovation 
• Communication and Collaboration
• Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
• Digital Citizenship

NETS-T Standards Addressed:

• Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

• Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments
• Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
• Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility

Research-Based Instructional Strategies Used: 

• Cooperative learning
• Summarizing
• Nonlinguistic representations 

For more information on cell phone safety and setting your classroom up for success see Teaching Generation Text: Using Cell Phones to Enhance Learning