A debate about this in the Netherlands ended with a strong advice from the government to ban smartphones and watches in classrooms.
It does have a positive impact, yet I keep thinking about why we teach the way we do. Is the problem not that the ‘classroom’ is outdated and not serving the educational needs of today?
Educator here.
Absolutely not. Direct instruction with retrieval practice is the best way we know of to make changes to long term memory (learn).
Technology is absolutely necessary in a modern classroom. Smartphones are not. Children (<18y.o.) cannot handle the attention grabbing aspects of smart phone use. Or should that be that if a child has to chose between paying attention in a classroom and paying attention to a device, the device always wins.
We use our own smartphones as part of studying since the start of (equivalent to) high school. Teachers send us notes electronically, we read them there. Sometimes teachers may ask us to search something because they only have old feature phones and most of us have data. We even do tests on them via EduPage, although that one may not be the best idea due to the ease of cheating.
Sure, we do have computers at school, but the network is often broken, and many of them still run Windows XP. And those that got upgraded to Windows 10 have many issues because the hardware can’t handle it.
Sure technology may be convenient, but it doesn’t conversely improve learning.
I wished I had the power of a smartphone in my pocket, when I was young. It is a great thing to have things organized digitally and get rid of pen and paper.
Of course you can do dumb things with a smartphone, but there are many tools you can misuse. Teaching young people how to take advantage of the tools is more reasonable than to take them away.
Research shows again and again that it doesn’t work that way. Smartphones are tools at work or in university. For children they are neither useful nor necessary in school.
Getting rid of pen and paper also isn’t something we should advance in school as hand writing also helps the cognitive learning process.
As someone who is left handed and was always downgraded for sloppy penmanship, I bitterly seethe at the notion and resent every educator who inflicted handwritten essays on me.
There are also devices that translate handwriting to digital documents. You have them searchable, editable and safe.
While I agree that you don’t need mobile phones in the classroom (you can organize stuff later), they are necessary to organize life. Also schools already use email, share documents and appointments digitally.
That said, I cannot live without my calendars, emails, quick access to important documents and family chat I use daily. I can absolutely live without a pen. The only time I really need it is when my (non-digital) signature is needed.
I can’t help but point out that smartphones (with the apps typically found on them) are essentially on-demand dopamine devices. Pretty much any game or social media app you can install has as its primary goal to get you addicted. That’s their business model.
Very little can hope to compete for a child’s attention against such a device. In fact, I think even the fact that we are allowing children to be exposed to this when pretty much everyone agrees that they should be protected from drugs (alcohol, nicotine, etc. included) is kind of crazy.
As a greek I have one thing to say:
You use phones in classrooms?
As a Bangladeshi I have the same thing to say. This is even unthinkable here. Not even students will find it appropriate here.
It gets touted as educational, even.
but the countries they are allowed in are rich enough to give them school computer or tablet
So do teachers. It still doesn’t stop it.
Access to a dictionary or thesaurus, or the dozens of mathematical axioms and theorems were were expected to know intrinsically might have helped.
In retrospect despite the well-meaning intent of some of my teachers, the institution of the unified school district of my childhood acted in bad faith. It was interested in the containment of children. It allowed for abuse. It taught false propaganda as truth and fact. It deserved far more mischief and resistance than it received from my class.
And schools in the states have gotten only worse, not better.
Without an uncompromised educational system it is up to our youth to teach themselves, to recognize for themselves they’re being molded and constrained to serve as interchangeable, disposable laborers and solders within vanity projects of plutocratic billionaires, in a society that is not yet working towards sustainability through their lifetime.
Regardless of what I think about cellphone usage in the classroom. I don’t think this is something that UNESCO should have saying in. And definitely not be able to ban. Nor do I belive government should have saying in. This just should be the decision of each school on how they want to approach this.
When school are publicly funded you, naturally, get govt opinions on the matter.
I do agree with you. I think it’s a decision that should be made at the lowest level possible.
Outside of subjects they are interested in, learning about anything can be quite boring. Even if it’s a necessity, it’s obvious why a child ends up being distracted by an object essentially designed to be their interest.
The problem with banning these devices in classrooms is that unless you enforce it in any meaningful way, it ends up just being a game of hide and seek with minimal consequences to them (short term at least).
UNESCO calling students to stop using their phones is even less effective than the teachers themselves trying to do it, and we already know how that turns out.
Definitely support the ban, even with laptops back in the uni days it was too easy to get distracted, I can’t imagine smartphones now with all the attention-grabbing apps on them.
Well I, an utterly insignificant individual, don’t.
