Teaching Tool or Learning Noose I only had to experience the headache of dealing with cell phone distractions once and in only one class before I dedicated teaching time outside of class to figure out how to use all of those attention-grabbing marks that you see in the Tally Chart of Cell Phone Notifications below for just one class period like this one was to help me teach instead of letting cell phone distractions keep me from teaching. There are quite a few novel ideas I and other teachers have come up with to make cell phones a teaching tool rather than a learning noose. I will discuss some of the things that might be considered that could turn cell phone usage into a teaching tool rather than a noose-ending learning tool for every minute a student is in class later in this post or break such ideas out individually in subsequent postings on the subject. Cell phones can be toxic to a learning environment. (Thank you to Mary Garza for her FB post) A teacher in the U.S. had her stu