cell phone lesson plans for teachers (source: edutopia.org)

The lesson is specially designed to help students express themselves and to give them the chance to practice speaking. Another advantage of this lesson is the fact that after learning the lesson, the student will have a better understanding of the terms “mobile communication” and “mobile phone”. First of all, the student will be asked to talk, using their own words, about the use of mobile phones in generally, having the opportunity to describe the way in which they use their mobile phones.

Another part of the lesson will give the students the chance to create and perform telephone conversations, decipher text messages and write their own.  The lesson also contains a worksheet that will allow students to give their opinion on mobile phone related topics and compare the answers to the other students.  An interesting exercise within this lesson is the one where students have a number of sentences in the form of cutouts. These cutouts put together build a phone conversation, but due to the fact that they’re not in the correct order, it will be the students task to arrange them so the conversation will be correct.

cell phone lesson plans for teachers (source: media.nj.com)

A situation where imagination is put to the test is the exercise where student have to imagine conversations on certain topics like canceling a reservation, calling to say they’re going to be late due to a train strike or phoning a friend who’s late. Texting exercises are also an important part of the lesson as in many cases they contain all sorts of encoded messages that are sometimes hard to understand. For instance, the word “great” is written “GR8”, the expression “keep in touch” is “KIT” and “bye bye for now” is “BBFN”. “C U l8r” actually means “See you later”, but if you don’t know these codes, some messages, especially those received from teenagers could be unreadable.  

So, even if you are not a teacher, the English lesson about cell phones could be of a great use to you, as you not only learn the basic stuff, but also some things that might be from another planet at first sight.

cell phone lesson plans for teachers (source: edutopia.org)

The lesson is specially designed to help students express themselves and to give them the chance to practice speaking. Another advantage of this lesson is the fact that after learning the lesson, the student will have a better understanding of the terms “mobile communication” and “mobile phone”. First of all, the student will be asked to talk, using their own words, about the use of mobile phones in generally, having the opportunity to describe the way in which they use their mobile phones.

Another part of the lesson will give the students the chance to create and perform telephone conversations, decipher text messages and write their own.  The lesson also contains a worksheet that will allow students to give their opinion on mobile phone related topics and compare the answers to the other students.  An interesting exercise within this lesson is the one where students have a number of sentences in the form of cutouts. These cutouts put together build a phone conversation, but due to the fact that they’re not in the correct order, it will be the students task to arrange them so the conversation will be correct.

cell phone lesson plans for teachers (source: media.nj.com)

A situation where imagination is put to the test is the exercise where student have to imagine conversations on certain topics like canceling a reservation, calling to say they’re going to be late due to a train strike or phoning a friend who’s late. Texting exercises are also an important part of the lesson as in many cases they contain all sorts of encoded messages that are sometimes hard to understand. For instance, the word “great” is written “GR8”, the expression “keep in touch” is “KIT” and “bye bye for now” is “BBFN”. “C U l8r” actually means “See you later”, but if you don’t know these codes, some messages, especially those received from teenagers could be unreadable.  

So, even if you are not a teacher, the English lesson about cell phones could be of a great use to you, as you not only learn the basic stuff, but also some things that might be from another planet at first sight.

cell phone plans for children (source: shopaservice.com)

First, the mighty AT&T has two options you can apply to any family plan. The first is called Smart Limits and it allows parents to set monthly limits to a certain line included in the family plan. For only 5$ per month parents can set the exact limit of calls, messages and internet traffic that can be accessed from a certain phone. A great thing about this type of service is the fact that you have many limiting options. Like, for instance, you can block all outgoing calls, excepting certain numbers or you can block outgoing calls in certain time intervals. Another service from AT&T is the Family Map. This allows you to trace the location of your children using the phone’s internal GPS.

cell phone plans for children (source: img.ehowcdn.com)

For the same price, T-Mobile offers Family Allowances, a similar service which allows you to set a maximum limit of operations that can be done from a certain line. After the limit is reached, the user won’t be able to make calls, text or surf the web. A great thing about the option is that you can set Always Allowed numbers that can be called anytime, even if the limit is reached.

Sprint offers even more restrictions that can be made to a certain line. Using their service you can restrict the calls so that they can be made only to numbers in the phonebook, the phonebook containing only numbers approved by you. Verizon has a same offer as T-Mobile but after the minutes and text messages are up, calling is not blocked and you only receive a text message that will inform you of the fact.

Sometimes we even quit to some things and we prefer to buy cell phones instead of others because we attribute a high importance to the cell phones. We think that the cell phone is an important tool for us because we use it for a lot of things that are very important for us. The cell phones also mean some costs for us and we have to realize that if we have a cell phone we have to know that the cell phone will mean also some costs for us and we have to be sure that we can face the costs that will be brought along with the cell phone.

The cell phone’s costs consist of many things like: first of all talking on the cell phone means that you have to have a mobile phone plan, if you have a mobile phone plan, this means you will have a credit or a subscription for the cell phone and in this way you have to have the money to support the costs, there can be costs for service if the cell phone has a problem, or if you have to buy some accessories for it, you will also need money for it.

Sometimes, we do not pay attention to all the details and we do not consider the fact that in the future we will have to pay different sums of money for the cell phone. We think only at the immediate costs that mean the price that we pay for the cell phone and the subscription during the period of the contract but also after we will need to have credit or subscription for being able to use it.

The cell phone’s costs can be very low, meaning that besides the subscription or the credit you do not have to pay any other money, but they can be also very high if you have other types of problems with the cell phone, you have to pay for solving them. The costs may also vary because every type of brand or of model of cell phone can have different problems or different costs and if a model is very sophisticated then the problems that can appear to the cell phone are very sophisticated also and the costs for solving it are very high. So it is not so easy to have a cell phone because there can appear many problems that can give you a lot of future problems that you have to solve then and you have to take this in count when you decide to have a cell phone.

It is already enough the fact that we do not have free time because of the fact that we spend a lot hours working at the office, working even extra hours for gaining more money for us and for our family. And this seems not to be enough because we spend a lot of hours talking on the phone not only for business purposes but also for personal purposes. We talk a lot of minutes per day on the phone with friends, classmates, family and other people.

The telecommunications companies which provide cell phones services for a large number of people but not only the big companies have started to make extraordinary offers to try to take advantage of the necessity and new activity of people: staying too much on the phone. In this way they sort of had a strong influence on how much time people spend on the phone. So they had begun to create different types of tariffs plans and which also included hundred and thousand of minutes also in their network but also in another national and even international networks, also a great number of short text messages; from all of a sudden people had to choose from an extremely wide offer which was available on the market.

The best cell phones calling plans were hard to tell which were because they depended on the market, on the city, on the company but the majority of them had in common the large number of minutes and short text messages that they had at their disposal to use in their network. Not only the subscriptions had such calling plans but also the prepaid cards which had the prepaid credit; there were also many options which promised such advantages for not a big amount of credit monthly or at every two months.

Soon, everybody had started to pick their own type of calling plan, with different types of options: there were plans for evenings and weekends, there were plans for groups, for family, with a unique type of tariff and many other things. In fact the best cell phone calling planes could be all of them because they depended very much also on the network in which you were interested in and also on how many people you had to call in that type of network. But so it began the craziness with so many minutes to talk, so many messages to send, in one word so many time to waist in the company of your phone trying to finish all the advantages you were giving by the calling plan.