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The fact that cell phones pose a great risk when combined with driving cannot be of any surprise to anyone. Let’s face it. First, drivers must take their eyes off the road while dialing. Second, people can become so absorbed in their conversations or other cell phone use that their ability to concentrate on the act of driving is severely impaired, jeopardizing the safety of vehicle occupants and pedestrians alike.

Time Away from Homework. Technology affords teens (and adults) a host of ways to do something other than what they are supposed to, in this case homework.

Mounting Minutes ($$$) Since consumers must be 18 in order to purchase a cell phone contract in the United States, most parents are buying the phones their children carry. This is good news because parents can choose a plan that fits how the cell phone will be used and can review monthly cell phone bills which typically includes a log itemizing phone activity. However, problems still exist. For one, children can quickly go over their allotted minutes for the month which can leave their parents with bills that can easily approach hundreds of dollars for the month.

ead teachers are being advised to draw up new rules on mobile phone use amid a growing number of cases of what is now known as “cyber-bullying”. In many secondary schools, over 90% of bullying cases are through text messages or internet chatrooms. It is hoped that the rules about mobile phone use will protect children from abusive texts, stop phones going off in class and prevent mobiles being taken into exam halls.

Although the majority of kids who are harassed online aren’t physically bothered in person, the cyber-bully still takes a heavy emotional toll on his or her victims. Kids who are targeted online are more likely to get a detention or be suspended, skip school and experience emotional distress, the medical journal reports. Teenagers who receive rude or nasty comments via text messages are six times more likely to say they feel unsafe at school.

The problem is that bullying is still perceived by many educators and parents as a problem that involves physical contact. Most enforcement efforts focus on bullying in school classrooms, corridors and toilets. But given that 80% of adolescents use mobile phones or computers, “social interactions have increasingly moved from personal contact at school to virtual contact in the chatroom,'’ write Kirk R. Williams and Nancy G. Guerra, co-authors of one of the journal reports. “Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty.'’

The full extent of sexting has not been quantified, but a survey by a teenage girls' magazine found 40 per cent of respondents had been asked to send sexual images of themselves.

Police say sexting rates are already high, while Kids Help Line says nearly half their bullying-related calls can be attributed to cyber-bullying.

etective Sergeant Campbell Davis, of the Victoria Police internet child exploitation team, said girls were especially targeted, and the third-generation of mobile phone technology, or 3G, which can send large image files straight to the internet, was exacerbating the problem. "It is a very powerful technology and we need to teach our children how quickly images can be forwarded," he said.

As soon as there's a new technology, it's used for sex," says Sarah Jacobs, curator of the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, which explains why people of all ages and persuasions send out naked pictures via cell phone, Craigslist and MySpace and post their sex videos on sites like YouPorn.

In the past six months alone, there's been a deluge of news stories about middle- and high-school students getting into trouble for sending around naked pictures and sex videos of themselves or classmates. The disposition of the cases has been wildly disparate: Some kids are arrested, some punished at school and others are lectured about online safety.

Carrill is part of the Platte County Sheriff’s Office. He also leads the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force. One of his primary missions is to track down and arrest online predators who trade in child pornography.And all these cameras only make his job more challenging. About 40 percent of the nation’s minors have access to Webcams, Carrill explained, devices for uploading live video to the Internet. About 65 percent of all children have access to cell phone cameras.

erhaps the biggest issue is that fact that kids don’t understand that when a picture is posted online, it’s nearly impossible to remove.“Once that image is taken, it’s out there forever,” Shehan said. “The No. 1 issue that we’ve seen with Webcams is teenagers self-producing pornography.”

All we can tell them is, ‘I’m sorry,’” Carrill said. “The minute the camera clicks, you no longer own that image. It has the potential to harm that person years from now.”A Webcam placed in a child’s bedroom is another bad combination, according to Shehan and Carrill. Sexual predators search for kids who use Webcams in the privacy of their own rooms, then lure or blackmail the child into providing pictures of themselves.“We see cases time after time of children who take pictures, send them to a predator and get a pornographic collage back that the predator uses to blackmail the child into providing more images,” Shehan said.

The annual Mobile Life report, commissioned by the Carphone Warehouse and the London School of Economics, says that 11 per cent of children aged 11 to 18 have had sexually explicit conversations online, with 28 per cent admitting they have accessed adult websites.

Many often pretend to be doing homework when in fact they surfing the internet, with 49 per cent saying that they lie to their parents about what they are doing online.

The reports, compiled from a survey of 6,000 people, also analysed the difference between American and British teenagers, with children in the UK emerging as much more sophisticated. For instance, 53 per cent of British youngsters have communicated by webcam, something that just 18 per cent of their American cousins have done.

One in 10 of these preteenagers has responded to and chatted online with strangers, according to the Tween Internet Safety Survey, sponsored by Cox Communications and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

90 percent of American kids have used the Internet by age 9 and more than a third of 11- and 12-year-olds have a profile on social-network sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Of the tweens with social-network profiles, 61 percent post personal photos online, 48 percent admit to posting a fake age online and 51 percent have received messages from people they didn't know.

What You Can Do If you are concerned about your children accessing adult material from their wireless phones/devices, consider the following: Monitor how your children are using their wireless phones or other wireless devices. For example, are they using them mainly for talking, or are they using them for messaging, taking photos and downloading applications? Check with your carrier to see what types of material it offers and what types can be accessed from your children’s handsets. Check with your carrier to see if there are ways to prevent access to and downloading of content that may contain inappropriate material and that is available on a per-use or per-application basis (e.g., games, wall paper images, songs). Monitor your bill. Any content purchases made from a wireless phone should appear on your monthly bill, so check your bill to see if any purchases have been made from your children’s phones/devices. The FCC requires that the descriptions of charges on wireless carrier bills be full, clear, non-deceptive, and in plain language. Check with your carrier to see what handsets are available for your children that are not capable of accessing advanced applications that may contain adult material. Check with your carrier to see whether subscriptions to wireless data or wireless Internet packages also offer access to adult material on your children’s phone.

Brown's class was discussing some of the whaling calculations in Moby Dick. When one student asked a question involving a complex computation, three students quickly pulled out their cell phones and did the math. Brown was surprised to learn that most cell phones have a built-in calculator. She was even more surprised at how literate her students were with the many functions included in their phones. She took a quick poll and found that all her students either had a cell phone or easy access to one. In fact, students became genuinely engaged in a class discussion about phone features. This got Brown thinking about how she might incorporate this technology into learning activities.

Brown noticed that many students used text messaging to communicate, and considered how she might use cell phones in summarizing and analyzing text to help her students better understand Richard III. Effective summarizing is one of the most powerful skills students can cultivate. It provides students with tools for identifying the most important aspects of what they are learning, especially when teachers use a frame of reference (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Summarizing helps students identify critical information. Research shows gains in reading comprehension when students learn how to incorporate isummary framesi (series of questions designed to highlight critical passages) as a tool for summarizing (Meyer & Freedle, 1984). When students use this strategy, they are better able to understand what they are reading, identify key information, and provide a summary that helps them retain the information (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987).

Text messaging is a real-world example of summarizing—to communicate information in a few words the user must identify key ideas. Brown saw that she could use a technique students had already mastered, within the context of literature study.

The Wireless Foundation has been working since 2005 to educate kids as well as their parents and teachers about the safe and responsible use of cellular phones through the Get Wise About Wireless program. 

The resources below can help you to keep your children safe online, such as a parent-child agreement on responsible and acceptable use of a wireless device, tools your carrier may have available to keep your family safe online, as well as other useful links.