Digital Devices

A flurry of recent articles brings home yet one more way that technology is changing education: In districts across the country, snow days are becoming relics of the past. Beginning on December 1, for example, the schools around Camden, Maine, will replace two snow days per year with so-called Remote School Days, when students will complete coursework at home using internet-connected devices.

Given that many employers around the country have been implementing work from home policies in recent years, it was probably inevitable that the idea would spread to schools. And for schools, there’s the logic of the initial investment: If they’ve spent money acquiring devices for every student, as many have done, there’s a strong argument to be made that they should maximize the utility of those devices—part of the rationale for buying them is to expand students’ opportunities for learning.

A recent article from EdSurge states that several education-technology experts have found efforts to limit the amount of students' screen time may be less effective than focusing on how they are using their screens.  Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology Education, says screen time is best used to collaborate and problem solve instead of clicking through a digital textbook or filling in digital worksheets.

How can you use technology to coordinate meetings of friends and family this holiday season (and all year long) when people with widely varying levels of digital literacy all rely on the same tech to get together? Brian Chen has some ideas for gathering a group, group chatting options, and even how to share pictures after your gatherings, in an article entitled Make Your Friends and Family Less Irksome This Holiday Season.

A national program called Fluency uses smart thermometers to track the spread of diseases in schools. The devices record student temperatures and symptoms and link to an app so the information can be shared anonymously with school nurses and parents. The Fluency program and smart thermometer technology were developed by Kinsa Health to detect illness in real-time, helping individuals and communities respond before it spreads.

Schools are increasingly focused on ensuring that educational technologies are available to all students, including those with disabilities. To help with this mission, schools and other organizations are inviting software engineers to visit their classrooms to see first hand how the programs are used and how they can be improved to ensure accessibility. For example, they may discover that programs full of unlabeled pictures are totally useless to blind users who have no idea they’re there. It may sound like common sense, but often that is the missing link in the creation of affordable and effective educational software that is useful to all students.

A recent study by Boomerang aimed to examine the importance of downtime and humor for children. The study comes on the heels of recent research from The LEGO Group finding that 88% of families who play together for five hours or more a week claim to be happy, despite playtime getting squeezed due to hectic schedules. Boomerang found that nearly half of the parents surveyed reported that their children spend 4-7 hours each week at extracurricular activities. A quarter of respondents say their kids often have more commitments and busier social lives than they do, and don’t get enough downtime or relaxation. The parents taking the survey had children between the ages of 4 and 7 and were from France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa and Turkey.  

Generation Z is often accused of having their noses in their phones 24/7, so it was an eye opener when more than 2,000 teenagers answered a call by The New York Times to show photos of their lives to help capture the "complete" lifestyle of Generation Z. The images -- including a teen mother cradling her infant and a student-athlete waiting for word about college -- aim to help counter stereotypes of Generation Z.

An Oxford study in the Journal of Pediatrics associated every hour of digital screen time to 3 - 8 minutes of shorter nightly sleep among children and teens, with screen time accounting for less than 1.9% of observed sleep outcome variability. The findings, based on 2016 National Survey of Children's Health data involving 50,212 youths ages 6 months to 17 years, "suggest that the relationship between sleep and screen use in children is extremely modest," said researcher Andrew Przybylski. A previous study showed that between 50 percent and 90 percent of school-age children might not be getting enough quality sleep, but researchers say their new findings suggest screen time is not the only culprit affecting sleep time.

Some tech-savvy parents in Silicon Valley are fighting back against the widespread use of screens, saying children have the potential to become addicted to their phones, tablets, televisions and other technology. Athena Chavarria, a former executive assistant at Facebook who works at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said, "I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children." Others feel the jury is still out on what children’s exposure to technology will bring, but almost everyone stresses some limits. Where does your family stand on potential tech addiction?

While 64% of teachers say schools should emphasize teaching technology, only 32% say students are actively using technology to create things or perform data analysis, according to a survey of 2000 K-12 teachers from PwC and the Business-Higher Education Forum, eSchool News reports. Student access to technology is one key bottleneck, and about half of teachers note that their students lack either a device or internet access at home.