At my last school, an all through k-12 with a middle school of about 350 kids, we had a tech problem. Kids watched at their phones at break and lunchtime, inert and transfixed (often whilst shooting zombies). Groups would gather around one or two phones, plotting and giggling as they commented on other people's selfies and memes on Instagram. Sporadic groups playing Fortnite or Minecraft would pop up like mushrooms. Textbooks obscured hands that snapped photos of unsuspecting classmates during double maths. Complaints of cyber-bullying were all-too-frequent. Often the kids didn't have bad intentions, they thought it was ¨funny¨ but nevertheless once a silly photo like that is out in the public domain it's impossible to retrieve it. Adults bemoaned the perceived lack of social interaction at break time. Kids would quite openly express that they needed their phones to avoid feeling uncomfortable. We had a tech problem.
Whatsapp groups were used as tools of social control; more powerful children could kick the weaker out of groups at will. All of this hidden was from the eyes of their teachers and parents. On one or two occasions, students would snap photos of teachers teaching. Nobody should have to teach whilst running the risk of a teenager doing this; the intention was not to go over the contents of the class later. Bathrooms and changing rooms were places of potential risk despite supervision and signs indicating the seriousness of photographing in this zone. Inappropriate videos were passed around on the bus with younger kids seeing things they were not able to unsee.
We had a rule which I understand is quite common in schools, you could use the phones for "academic purposes" in class. Unsurprisingly, this unclear rule was ripe for exploitation by tenacious 8th graders. Who defines what academic purposes are? How long does it last for? How do you check whether the purpose is truly academic or not? It was a massive grey area and what happens with massive grey areas? Students set up camp at the greyest point.
The more committed tech enthusiasts will say, why didn't you just teach them to use it properly? I can honestly say we tried our best. We tried classes and posters about digital citizenship, visits from the police about cyber-crime, videos and songs about the importance of balancing facetime with face-to-face communications. We sent out informational emails to parents about all the more recent ways that cell phones can be a source of danger. It didn't work. I suspect it didn't work because cellphones are seriously addictive, computer games are seriously addictive, likes and retweets and comments from our friends are seriously addictive. Maybe we reached a few kids but the majority of them continued unabated.
What did we do? We banned phones. Phones needed to be turned off and out of sight at all points in school. Anyone using their phones would have it confiscated until the end of the day and if it was repeated their parents would need to come and pick the phone up. It was simple, painless and just required some dedicated and consistent implementation. What else did we do? We held a number of workshops with parents explaining to them the importance of monitoring their children's phones. We presented them with a number of serious safeguarding concerns (names and details changed of course) that had come about because of inappropriate mobile phone use and asked them how they could help us prevent this occurring. We got them to agree to check their children's phones and we agreed to ban them completely at school. The rules we generated as a community were shared with students and governed their use of phones outside of school time.
What happened? Firstly, the cyberbullying stopped at school and decreased outside of school. I am not saying kids suddenly changed their nature or became inherently more self-controlled but there was less temptation and opportunity. This is because they didn't have phones; this is not rocket science. Of course, we still had problems but the other types of problems didn't increase to fill the naughtiness void created by the lack of cyber problems. The fact that they went away meant they went away.
What did we observe? Well, kids in sixth-grade starting playing cops and robbers and more kids went out more regularly to play football. A bunch of seventh graders began playing chess. Another group started a war hammer painting club at lunchtime. Teachers commented on how much noisier the middle school kids were as they ran gleefully around. The kids in the older years looked at our lot with envy as they rediscovered the joys of running around and yelling at each other.
Kids were thankful. They moaned a bit at first but after a while, most agreed it was positive. One major parental concern, being able to contact their kids to make changes in transport or in case of emergency, never materialised. When they had an issue they called the office and the office conveyed the message to the kid. We insisted they contact the office only for emergencies or to make important changes in transportation. It probably meant parents had to give their kids clearer expectations about their transport arrangements. This is definitely not a bad thing.
This isn't an "anti-tech" tirade. Digital tech advocates are quick to point out that you cannot be "against" tech, it's like being against spoons or chairs or aeroplanes. But, let's be fair, this same argument means we cannot just be for tech either. It's merely an argument for discernment. If all tech is value-neutral we need to distinguish what we want and what we don't want. I cannot want more guns or knives in schools because they are "tech". I cannot want more digital technology just because there is more digital technology in the world. Schools should take a lead in setting out how to create balance. The questions should be, does this use of tech enhance learning? Is there anything that this expensive piece of equipment can do that we currently cannot do? The narrative of tech being transformational is often accompanied by frustrated looking teachers battling kids digital distractions whilst trying to do something they could just have easily done with a piece of paper. Tech needs to serve the end of learning; it's not an end in itself. We have seen various attempts at transforming education through the use of tech, beginning with those who thought that videos would transform the classroom. It hasn't materialised. My suspicion as to why is that teaching is a very human activity. We need to read peoples faces, make micro adjustments to our delivery according to the emotional tenure of the room. We want kids to respect each other and to be engaged with the authenticity of each other's lived experience. In front of a screen, they are atomised and often distracted. We should be cautious when introducing technology, only doing it when we have a clear and specific purpose in mind. Technology should serve our purposes as educators, not the other way around.
If we want to teach kids to code, let's teach them to code. If we want to teach kids to use google docs or google apps, let's do that. If they need to learn to program robots we can teach them to program robots. What we should not expect is that just using tech to research things or create products is in itself going to enhance improve their overall cognitive abilities or ability to function in the digital age. We need to decide what, when and how to use tech not try to crowbar it into everything.
The cautionary tale of "you can just google it" is important. There was a time, let's call it 2007, when people genuinely believed learning knowledge was unimportant because, well, we had a world of information at our fingertips. Instead, children should spend their timing arriving at a deeper more generalised conceptual understanding of the world. The details weren't important. Here's a fact for you, deeper conceptual understanding requires a solid basis of factual knowledge in memory. General builds on specific, not the other way around. As a philosophy teacher, if I want to get a kid to understand a big generalised concept like rationalism, then I absolutely need them to know some facts about rationalism. I will need them to read about Descartes, understand what synthetic a priori propositions are. Without this knowledge, we cannot get the sophisticated evaluative responses we desire. Getting them to google "rationalism", read about it themselves then present it back is in no way more likely to lead to deeper conceptual understanding than following a carefully sequenced series of lessons designed with this intent.
I have seen classes where "research" involves kids googling something, taking the first page of answers, clicking a link, reading the source (if I am lucky) before copying it across to a power point, changing some words than "presenting" it back to the class. The actual process of learning the material doesn't happen. The quality of the material they are supposed to be learning is unknown as each one looks up different stuff. The question of did they understand what they are reading? Does it connect to something they already know? Is the language, explanation and purpose of the text they googled appropriate? Often the teacher is in the dark about all of these things. Why not just teach them using the expertise or textbook that was designed for this very purpose?
The tech evangelists are forced into saying that this is about teachers not using tech correctly. This goes back to the transformation argument. According to this, we should be using tech to make and reshape, tinker and experiment. I am at a loss to understand why using a computer makes you more imaginative or creative. I have yet to have the logic explained to me. The most creative essays, the most powerful arguments, the best art, these are not of quality because they involved googling things. They are of quality because the person who created them had a really good idea of what quality looked like and the person to provide that information is the one expert in the room, the teacher. Similarly, those people who go on to innovate in tech and create the next generation of gadgets will be those people who have mastered the domain in which they innovate in. You cannot imagine things that are not combinations of concepts and ideas you already know something about. There are very strong arguments for teaching computer science and computational thinking as a domain within which students can develop expertise. It's not necessary to be always on a screen to achieve this, as attested to by the reluctance of silicon valley execs to expose their children to the screens and blips they designed.
So there you go. We had a problem, we proposed a solution, everyone was better off as a result. Getting rid of phones didn't mean teachers couldn't teach kids how to use google docs or send emails but it did mean balance was restored, downtime was prioritised and human contact was restored.
Whatsapp groups were used as tools of social control; more powerful children could kick the weaker out of groups at will. All of this hidden was from the eyes of their teachers and parents. On one or two occasions, students would snap photos of teachers teaching. Nobody should have to teach whilst running the risk of a teenager doing this; the intention was not to go over the contents of the class later. Bathrooms and changing rooms were places of potential risk despite supervision and signs indicating the seriousness of photographing in this zone. Inappropriate videos were passed around on the bus with younger kids seeing things they were not able to unsee.
We had a rule which I understand is quite common in schools, you could use the phones for "academic purposes" in class. Unsurprisingly, this unclear rule was ripe for exploitation by tenacious 8th graders. Who defines what academic purposes are? How long does it last for? How do you check whether the purpose is truly academic or not? It was a massive grey area and what happens with massive grey areas? Students set up camp at the greyest point.
The more committed tech enthusiasts will say, why didn't you just teach them to use it properly? I can honestly say we tried our best. We tried classes and posters about digital citizenship, visits from the police about cyber-crime, videos and songs about the importance of balancing facetime with face-to-face communications. We sent out informational emails to parents about all the more recent ways that cell phones can be a source of danger. It didn't work. I suspect it didn't work because cellphones are seriously addictive, computer games are seriously addictive, likes and retweets and comments from our friends are seriously addictive. Maybe we reached a few kids but the majority of them continued unabated.
What did we do? We banned phones. Phones needed to be turned off and out of sight at all points in school. Anyone using their phones would have it confiscated until the end of the day and if it was repeated their parents would need to come and pick the phone up. It was simple, painless and just required some dedicated and consistent implementation. What else did we do? We held a number of workshops with parents explaining to them the importance of monitoring their children's phones. We presented them with a number of serious safeguarding concerns (names and details changed of course) that had come about because of inappropriate mobile phone use and asked them how they could help us prevent this occurring. We got them to agree to check their children's phones and we agreed to ban them completely at school. The rules we generated as a community were shared with students and governed their use of phones outside of school time.
What happened? Firstly, the cyberbullying stopped at school and decreased outside of school. I am not saying kids suddenly changed their nature or became inherently more self-controlled but there was less temptation and opportunity. This is because they didn't have phones; this is not rocket science. Of course, we still had problems but the other types of problems didn't increase to fill the naughtiness void created by the lack of cyber problems. The fact that they went away meant they went away.
What did we observe? Well, kids in sixth-grade starting playing cops and robbers and more kids went out more regularly to play football. A bunch of seventh graders began playing chess. Another group started a war hammer painting club at lunchtime. Teachers commented on how much noisier the middle school kids were as they ran gleefully around. The kids in the older years looked at our lot with envy as they rediscovered the joys of running around and yelling at each other.
Kids were thankful. They moaned a bit at first but after a while, most agreed it was positive. One major parental concern, being able to contact their kids to make changes in transport or in case of emergency, never materialised. When they had an issue they called the office and the office conveyed the message to the kid. We insisted they contact the office only for emergencies or to make important changes in transportation. It probably meant parents had to give their kids clearer expectations about their transport arrangements. This is definitely not a bad thing.
This isn't an "anti-tech" tirade. Digital tech advocates are quick to point out that you cannot be "against" tech, it's like being against spoons or chairs or aeroplanes. But, let's be fair, this same argument means we cannot just be for tech either. It's merely an argument for discernment. If all tech is value-neutral we need to distinguish what we want and what we don't want. I cannot want more guns or knives in schools because they are "tech". I cannot want more digital technology just because there is more digital technology in the world. Schools should take a lead in setting out how to create balance. The questions should be, does this use of tech enhance learning? Is there anything that this expensive piece of equipment can do that we currently cannot do? The narrative of tech being transformational is often accompanied by frustrated looking teachers battling kids digital distractions whilst trying to do something they could just have easily done with a piece of paper. Tech needs to serve the end of learning; it's not an end in itself. We have seen various attempts at transforming education through the use of tech, beginning with those who thought that videos would transform the classroom. It hasn't materialised. My suspicion as to why is that teaching is a very human activity. We need to read peoples faces, make micro adjustments to our delivery according to the emotional tenure of the room. We want kids to respect each other and to be engaged with the authenticity of each other's lived experience. In front of a screen, they are atomised and often distracted. We should be cautious when introducing technology, only doing it when we have a clear and specific purpose in mind. Technology should serve our purposes as educators, not the other way around.
If we want to teach kids to code, let's teach them to code. If we want to teach kids to use google docs or google apps, let's do that. If they need to learn to program robots we can teach them to program robots. What we should not expect is that just using tech to research things or create products is in itself going to enhance improve their overall cognitive abilities or ability to function in the digital age. We need to decide what, when and how to use tech not try to crowbar it into everything.
The cautionary tale of "you can just google it" is important. There was a time, let's call it 2007, when people genuinely believed learning knowledge was unimportant because, well, we had a world of information at our fingertips. Instead, children should spend their timing arriving at a deeper more generalised conceptual understanding of the world. The details weren't important. Here's a fact for you, deeper conceptual understanding requires a solid basis of factual knowledge in memory. General builds on specific, not the other way around. As a philosophy teacher, if I want to get a kid to understand a big generalised concept like rationalism, then I absolutely need them to know some facts about rationalism. I will need them to read about Descartes, understand what synthetic a priori propositions are. Without this knowledge, we cannot get the sophisticated evaluative responses we desire. Getting them to google "rationalism", read about it themselves then present it back is in no way more likely to lead to deeper conceptual understanding than following a carefully sequenced series of lessons designed with this intent.
I have seen classes where "research" involves kids googling something, taking the first page of answers, clicking a link, reading the source (if I am lucky) before copying it across to a power point, changing some words than "presenting" it back to the class. The actual process of learning the material doesn't happen. The quality of the material they are supposed to be learning is unknown as each one looks up different stuff. The question of did they understand what they are reading? Does it connect to something they already know? Is the language, explanation and purpose of the text they googled appropriate? Often the teacher is in the dark about all of these things. Why not just teach them using the expertise or textbook that was designed for this very purpose?
The tech evangelists are forced into saying that this is about teachers not using tech correctly. This goes back to the transformation argument. According to this, we should be using tech to make and reshape, tinker and experiment. I am at a loss to understand why using a computer makes you more imaginative or creative. I have yet to have the logic explained to me. The most creative essays, the most powerful arguments, the best art, these are not of quality because they involved googling things. They are of quality because the person who created them had a really good idea of what quality looked like and the person to provide that information is the one expert in the room, the teacher. Similarly, those people who go on to innovate in tech and create the next generation of gadgets will be those people who have mastered the domain in which they innovate in. You cannot imagine things that are not combinations of concepts and ideas you already know something about. There are very strong arguments for teaching computer science and computational thinking as a domain within which students can develop expertise. It's not necessary to be always on a screen to achieve this, as attested to by the reluctance of silicon valley execs to expose their children to the screens and blips they designed.
So there you go. We had a problem, we proposed a solution, everyone was better off as a result. Getting rid of phones didn't mean teachers couldn't teach kids how to use google docs or send emails but it did mean balance was restored, downtime was prioritised and human contact was restored.
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