this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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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 Is the problem not that the ‘classroom’ is outdated and not serving the educational needs of today?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.
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.
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 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.