From this week’s Galway City Tribune – A city secondary school has introduced a novel way to free their students from the distraction of their mobile phones.

By attaching the ‘Phone Away Box’ to lockers, mobile devices can be safely stowed away for the day – in plain sight, so that teachers can see the phones aren’t covertly ending up in the classroom.

Deputy Principal at the Bish, Sarah Gleeson, says teachers were never in any doubt about the distraction phones were creating, but it was when one student’s device was confiscated that the scale of the problem came into sharp focus.

“We had a situation where the principal confiscated a phone and left it on their desk and they could see that over the course of the day, 58 notifications flashed up,” she says.

“After that, we came to recognise just how distracting that must be for students.”

The Phone Away Box was co-created by a school principal at Leinster Senior College in Co Kildare, Karl Hegarty, and the Bish is the latest in a number of schools to take up this innovative approach to reducing ‘the noise’ students have to deal with.

The Phone Away Box is an acrylic, see-though box that’s attached to the door of students’ lockers and can only be accessed at designated times in the day.

Sarah explains that students in the Bish lock away their phones in the morning, retrieve them at lunchtime and place them back for the remainder of the afternoon.
This is a shortened preview version of this column. For more Bradley Bytes, see the April 14 edition of the Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.