It's not enough to get smartphones out of class, argues Clare Morell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Newsweek. "Educational" laptops and tablets are doing more harm to student learning than good.
It's clear that phone bans work to improve learning, especially for the lowest-performing students, and to improve the "social environment," Morell writes. The next step is to rethink students' access to Chromebooks and other devices that were supposed to raise achievement but have proven to be ineffective.
Children understand more when they read on printed books, rather than looking at screens, she writes. Screens encourage skimming, rather than deep reading. Writing by hand is better for students than tapping on keyboards.
Devices are distracting. Even dedicated students have trouble concentrating when classmates are playing video games -- or watching porn, she writes. "Common Sense Media found that nearly a third of teens have viewed pornography during the school day," and 44 percent of these teens have used a school-issued device.
Classroom laptops were supposed to prepare children for a digital future, let students learn at their own pace and personalize instruction, writes Michael Bloomberg. Ninety percent of schools provide laptops or tablets to their students. But academic and social skills are deteriorating. It's time to limit screen time in school, he argues.
"A post-pandemic survey found that more than a quarter of students spend five hours of class time daily on screens," he writes. Yet, "studies have found that time-tested methods of learning — such as reading and writing on a page — are superior to screen-based approaches."
Sylvie McNamara's son spent ninth grade entertaining himself on his school-issued laptop and ignoring the teacher, she writes in . "At the beginning of each class period, he’d open the computer, do some teen witchcraft to get around the school’s site-blocking and screen-monitoring software, then spend biology or Spanish watching TV shows and playing games."
"Finally, we started keeping the laptop at home," she writes. "It meant our son couldn’t do some of his in-class assignments (math problems, online quizzes), but he hadn’t been doing them anyway." His grades improved.
He now attends a tech-free Waldorf school, where he's focused, engaged and learning.
Achievement scores are falling around the world, write Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch on After Babel. The rise in classroom laptops correlates with the decline in achievement, which is especially bad for weaker students.
Sophie Winkleman, who's campaigning to unplug classrooms in Britain, believes edtech distracts and shortens attention spans.
In An Ed-Tech Tragedy, UNESCO's Mark West looks at the high hopes for education technology, the disastrous effect of "remote learning" on children and the lessons to be learned.
One of his key takeaways is to "shift formal learning away from personal screens, especially for younger students," write Haidt and Rausch. No phones and no more laptops or tablets on students' desks.
I spent Algebra II in 1978 playing blackjack on a calculator. I was working independently of the class in the back. I'd borrow the calculator from a friend and spend my time doing that till I had to buckle down to get the assignments done every wee or so.
The entire set up of school encourages skimming, rather than deep reading or real learning.