How kids are getting around classroom phone bans

Schools with “bell-to-bell” phone bans are pushing students to bring back old-school methods to chat with friends—much to their teachers’ amusement. 

“Schoolkids are creating a Google Doc with their friends that they all have real-time access to, and they just type into it during class,” one teacher explained in a recent TikTok video. The clip had since racked up over 4.4 million views. “They basically reinvented the AOL chat room.” 

Other teachers have shared similar stories. “It’s like we are back in the nineties,” one said. “That’s what we did.” 

Rather than get mad, many teachers praised the students’ ingenuity. “Kids will always find a way, but honestly, the creativity involved is a skill worth developing,” one commented. 

The idea of pulling up a Google Doc to communicate with friends in class is not new, as many in the comments pointed out. But it is new to Gen Alphas, many of whom have grown up with phones never far from their fingertips. “Do they put BRB when they won’t be able to respond for a bit?” one joked.

A growing number of states—including New York, Florida, Oregon, and Virginia—have limited, and in some cases outright banned, cellphone use in schools. In response, students are looking back to the early 2000s and asking, “What did my parents do?” 

Along with the AOL chatroom, they are resurrecting Sony Discmans and iPod Shuffles as well as old-school games and puzzles, like Connect Four and Pac-Man, to keep them entertained while without access to phones. 

Concerns about distractions in class, worsening mental health, and cyberbullying are behind the bans. More than 70 percent of high school teachers say student phone distraction is a “major problem,” according to a 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center. Recent research also found that students who were made to hand over their cellphones while in class performed better academically than those who weren’t. 

That doesn’t mean banning phones is a perfect solution. Parents have voiced concerns about reaching their kids in an emergency, and a recent Pew Research Center survey found that while 74 percent of U.S. adults support banning phone use during class, only 44 percent back all-day bans. 

One European study also found that classroom phone bans did not noticeably improve health, well-being, and focus in lessons and, instead, needed to be coupled with bigger-picture regulations to make social media platforms safer and nonaddictive to children. 

Problems like cyberbullying are also not exclusive to smartphones. As one commenter warned: “Google Docs is a gateway drug to severe bullying.” In 2024, Bark, a risk-monitoring service that scans students’ school-administered Google and Microsoft accounts, reported more than 8.5 million documented cases of school cyberbullying via Google Docs since 2019, according to The New York Times. 

As any parent will know, for teens determined to chat with friends, where there’s a will, there’s a way. As one commenter wrote: “Wait until they rediscover passing notes.”

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