School contemplates jamming cell phones

[zahc]

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090730/NEWS/90730007/1001/NEWS

The main question is if this is legal with the FCC and all. The second question if it's a good idea considering that if any emergencies happen it's usually texts and cell phone calls that are the first wave of information. There's always the argument that we didn't have cell phones a decade ago, but I wonder if that would hold up in a wrongful death lawsuit.

[MicroBalrog]

Public education: Making homeschooling sound like a better idea with every day.

[LadySmith]

In a lot of the "gun free" school zones, the student warning system is linked to cell phones.
A crazed gunman comes on campus, they send out the alert to students' cell phones and wait for the police.
Not that this system does much good, but there it is.

[One of Many]

Totally illegal.

[AZRedhawk44]

Some smart kid would just invent a jammer-jammer.  Or leave his phone in the car and have some sort of non-affected frequency relay device.

The attempt to control for the sake of control constantly amazes me.  My hope is that the aging hippie douches currently in charge of our education system create a backlash in the next voting bloc they are attempting to educate.

[Boomhauer]

In a lot of the "gun free" school zones, the student warning system is linked to cell phones.
A crazed gunman comes on campus, they send out the alert to students' cell phones and wait for the police.
Not that this system does much good, but there it is.

I'll tell you something retarded.

My university had a no cellphones on policy ever since I have gone there. Then Virginia Tech happened, and they installed a warning system that also sends out texts.

Yet our student handbook and syllabuses still state that our cellphones should be off.

[crt360]

I can't speak for the kids now, many who seem to enjoy wasting an insane amount of time texting and talking on cell phones, but I'm sure glad I went to school before they were invented.

As for emergency notifications, what wrong with using the classroom intercoms or school PA system?  :|  It worked fine for our fire drills, bomb threat evacuations and tornado warnings.

[tyme]

Cell phone jamming is illegal.

Some smart kid would just invent a jammer-jammer.   Or leave his phone in the car and have some sort of non-affected frequency relay device.

Jamming cell phones involves spewing out RF noise on the relevant frequency band, so that the cell phones can't distinguish signals from noise.  Jammers don't receive anything, so they can't be jammed.  Adding more noise on top of an existing noise generator won't help at all when you're trying to pull out the original signal.

The obvious solution is to attack the jammer.  Destroy it, cut off its power, or simply report the owner to the FCC and local police for interfering with potential 911 calls...

As for emergency notifications, what wrong with using the classroom intercoms or school PA system?

Intercoms?  PA systems?  The 20th century is calling, and it wants you back.

[BlueStarLizzard]

alright, i was a freashman in hs, what ten years ago. and our high school was brand spanking new. my class was the first to go all the way through.

MHS was built to be the high school of the future. teachers took role on the computer which was hooked to the tv. our morning announcments where made on the same tv, from our very own A/V studio. the school had a state of the art computer network. it took our teachers three or four months to learn to use the stuff and a few never really did. hardware was all second rate gateway stuff on sale and the software crashed every ten minutes.
of course it took a few nerds on the popular kids payrole to circumvent the system to their own deveises in less then a day.  :rolleyes:

doesn't matter if its illigal or what not. my money says its not gonna work anyway.

and for college age kids, well, i never turned my cell off in class. silent or, usually vibrate, was fine and most profs didn't give a crap as long as you didn't mess up their lecture. 

[Boomhauer]

MHS was built to be the high school of the future. teachers took role on the computer which was hooked to the tv. our morning announcments where made on the same tv, from our very own A/V studio. the school had a state of the art computer network. it took our teachers three or four months to learn to use the stuff and a few never really did. hardware was all second rate gateway stuff on sale and the software crashed every ten minutes.

This exact same story repeats every time a new school is built. "School of the Future!!!", "Technology!!!", "Every classroom a smart classroom!", "Every teacher with a laptop!", "Every student with a laptop!", etc.

It's a bunch of crap. The stuff NEVER works as advertised, constantly has problems, etc. 99% of the time, the teachers revert to the standard whiteboard, dry erase markers, and overhead projectors.  When the teachers do use technology, such as Powerpoints, they are exceedingly boring and nothing is state of the art about it. This is just schools trying to substitute technology for actual teaching ability.

A good teacher can easily teach with just basic materials. A mediocre teacher will always be a mediocre teacher, no matter how much technology you throw at them.

[Nitrogen]

This exact same story repeats every time a new school is built. "School of the Future!!!", "Technology!!!", "Every classroom a smart classroom!", "Every teacher with a laptop!", "Every student with a laptop!", etc.

It's a bunch of crap. The stuff NEVER works as advertised, constantly has problems, etc. 99% of the time, the teachers revert to the standard whiteboard, dry erase markers, and overhead projectors.  When the teachers do use technology, such as Powerpoints, they are exceedingly boring and nothing is state of the art about it. This is just schools trying to substitute technology for actual teaching ability.

A true smart classroom would take experts in the field to design and maintain (In IT, etc)
Those experts cost money, money schools either don't have or won't spend on them, so they get second rate gear, and second rate "experts", and you get problems like you describe.

Of course, the teachers have to be trained too, but it really doesn' tmatter if the whole system is crap.  If you aren't going to do it right, don't do it at all.

As another poster said, good, talented teachers don't need it.

[RevDisk]

Active jamming?  That's illegal. 

Passive jamming?  (ie, padding the walls)   Usually legal, not always a bright idea.  Odds are, you will be held liable if you intentionally jam an emergency call.

[Nitrogen]

Faraday cage would do it.

It'd also break any other wireless device, like a walkie talkie, wireless network, etc.

I think it's just better to just leave it be.

[crt360]

Intercoms?  PA systems?  The 20th century is calling, and it wants you back.

So they don't have those any more?  Did they work too well?  Were they too cheap and simple to operate?  Obviously they weren't making somebody enough money.

As for the 20th century calling me back.  Yeah, maybe so.  :D

I really don't understand the importance of kids having phones at school.  I'm not saying I'm against it.  I just don't see what the need is.  If you can't use them in class, and you only have 5 minutes or so to get to your next class, what do you do with a phone, text a friend who's twenty feet down the hall about who's looking ugly or what you're eating for lunch?  Call your mom to bring you clean underwear?  Check up on your dealer?  Text your enemy to arrange a fight out by the bike racks?

Actually, I've always liked being one of the first to try out new tech stuff.  I've also learned over quite a few years of operating a business that replacing what worked, with something new and exciting that's supposed to work twice as well, can be a poor decision.

[BlueStarLizzard]

A good teacher can easily teach with just basic materials. A mediocre teacher will always be a mediocre teacher, no matter how much technology you throw at them.

yep, that.

[GigaBuist]

alright, i was a freashman in hs, what ten years ago. and our high school was brand spanking new. my class was the first to go all the way through.

MHS was built to be the high school of the future. teachers took role on the computer which was hooked to the tv. our morning announcments where made on the same tv, from our very own A/V studio. the school had a state of the art computer network. it took our teachers three or four months to learn to use the stuff and a few never really did. hardware was all second rate gateway stuff on sale and the software crashed every ten minutes.
of course it took a few nerds on the popular kids payrole to circumvent the system to their own deveises in less then a day.  :rolleyes:

doesn't matter if its illigal or what not. my money says its not gonna work anyway.

I'm an IT dork and I like technology to solutions more often than I should, but I'm of the opinion that we should stick to the basics and only use advanced IT when it makes sense.  One example of that would be access to the Internet where there exists a huge amount of information that wasn't traditionally available.

The danger in concentrating on the hot new stuff is that you might lose sight of the basics.  Like English.

[S. Williamson]

Wouldn't cellphone jamming also block staff and teacher's phones as well?

[Stand_watie]

This exact same story repeats every time a new school is built. "School of the Future!!!", "Technology!!!", "Every classroom a smart classroom!", "Every teacher with a laptop!", "Every student with a laptop!", etc.

It's a bunch of crap. The stuff NEVER works as advertised, constantly has problems, etc. 99% of the time, the teachers revert to the standard whiteboard, dry erase markers, and overhead projectors.  When the teachers do use technology, such as Powerpoints, they are exceedingly boring and nothing is state of the art about it. This is just schools trying to substitute technology for actual teaching ability...

Is that how "throwback" teachers do it now? In my day they reverted from chalkboard technology to scratching in the dirt  with a stick.

[AZRedhawk44]

This exact same story repeats every time a new school is built. "School of the Future!!!", "Technology!!!", "Every classroom a smart classroom!", "Every teacher with a laptop!", "Every student with a laptop!", etc.

It's a bunch of crap. The stuff NEVER works as advertised, constantly has problems, etc. 99% of the time, the teachers revert to the standard whiteboard, dry erase markers, and overhead projectors.  When the teachers do use technology, such as Powerpoints, they are exceedingly boring and nothing is state of the art about it. This is just schools trying to substitute technology for actual teaching ability.

A true smart classroom would take experts in the field to design and maintain (In IT, etc)
Those experts cost money, money schools either don't have or won't spend on them, so they get second rate gear, and second rate "experts", and you get problems like you describe.

Of course, the teachers have to be trained too, but it really doesn' tmatter if the whole system is crap.  If you aren't going to do it right, don't do it at all.

As another poster said, good, talented teachers don't need it.

The highest paid IT staff in the school district I used to work for made about $60K.

Most of us that actually did any of the installations or support made between $25 and $40K.

Once I finished my MCDBA and started interviewing, I got a job offer that doubled my salary and I was still underpaid in my field.  The comparable position at the school district would have taken me from $32K to $35K.

That's 12 months of work, too.  No 9 or 10 month contracts.  Those school holidays where the teachers and students take off?  That's your crunch time to make large scale changes in the system.  Summer is the time when you do prev. maint. on the hardware and replace 20% of the computers across the school district each year.

Schools cannot attract professional talent with that kind of money.

When they attract people like me who have significant talent but no credentials to back it up, we usually use the time in the trenches to build the credentials and then go make more money elsewhere.

[Gewehr98]

I don't know what's wrong with intercoms and PA systems, either.

Sure, they're analog, but so what?

[Ben]

As much as the obnoxious overuse of cell phones, blackberries, iPhones, etc. bugs me, I can see the value of official notifications to kids via their phones.

Found out the usefulness of this myself a few months ago. I'm in charge of Continuity of Operations (COOP), disaster response, etc for my office. We're required to do quarterly COOP drills, the results of which are put in a database in DC. My response times from staff have given me historically lousy scores in the database because the commie pinko staff I work with consider this kind of stuff "too military" and always blow off the required responses. Their response only has to be whether they are in a safe location or not.

This year I got smart and included everyone's cell phones in my drill emails, sending them short text messages to reply whether they are in a safe location or not. Result: Over 95% compliance within 30 minutes. Why? I figure because the "texting" culture is so ingrained in them that they can't resist replying, even if they would blow off the phone call. I even had one response that said "I'm too busy to deal with a drill right now", which took them longer to text me than simply texting "safe". 

[Boomhauer]

So they don't have those any more?  Did they work too well?  Were they too cheap and simple to operate?  Obviously they weren't making somebody enough money.

Intercom/PA systems...

While at the K-12 level, most kids are indoors and can hear a intercom or PA system, college students, for example, are often out of a building between classes. A warning system lets everybody with a cellphone or everyone in earshot of the alarm know that there is danger, be it from tornado, active shooter, etc.

Also, if I was an active shooter, the first place I'd visit would be the front office. Intercom system gone right there once the receptionist has been neutralized and the control box destroyed.

[Gewehr98]

With the receptionist out of the way, I guess that means she won't be activating the cell phone emergency texting system, either.

Unless, of course, she had trauma plates duct taped to her person, and a tactical wheelbarrow close at hand...

[Devonai]

I even had one response that said "I'm too busy to deal with a drill right now", which took them longer to text me than simply texting "safe".

Next time write back, "This is not a drill!  Hide under your desk!  We will find you!"

[AZRedhawk44]

With the receptionist out of the way, I guess that means she won't be activating the cell phone emergency texting system, either.

I thought of this as well.  The office is the weak spot in a traditional analog PA as well as a computerized system.

Redundant broadcast locations typically exist in the K-12 PA system in the gymnasium near the janitor's office.  The computerized redundant node could theoretically be anywhere as long as the logged in user has credentials to use it.

In that case, the computer system is more robust.

Of course, the weak point for the computer system is the core switch for the campus (or communication server... though the core switch is a 100% certainty target).  That can be dominated and destroyed by external hacking, internal quiet sabotage or by gunfire, and allow you to bypass a wide open lobby that may have more witnesses than you can potentially control.

sixaonehalfadozenoftheother.