The experienced educator from a secondary school in Melbourne told EducationHQ that the distraction and disruption caused by digital devices was on par with that previously caused by now-banned mobile phones.
The lure of devices is ever present, and especially for senior students, the teacher reported.
Even during short, whole class film screenings you can see orbs of blue light glowing around the room as students covertly attempt to use them, the educator noted.
“We have a lot of trouble trying to get students to put their device away during those times when they are not allowed to be using them.
“During form assembly at the start of the day, which is supposed to be collaborative time, they’re not allowed to have their device open, or then during explicit instruction or under the order of the teacher – but it’s actually a big challenge getting them to shut the lids.
“They're like jack-in-the-boxes, they keep popping back up. It’s like they can't resist them.”
On Monday, the Victorian Government doubled down on its mission to curtail the use of digital devices in public school classrooms, announcing that from next year all secondary schools must include planned ‘device-free time’ in their learning schedules.
Some schools have already banned their use in the classroom completely, the teacher we spoke to said, noting there was a growing awareness that edtech may not be delivering the learning gains or teaching benefits it has long espoused.
Lessons that require students to use devices for part of the time are problematic on a number of fronts, they explained.
“You’re supposed to be explicitly saying, ‘right, I want you to use your device now’, so the teacher’s meant to be in control of their use – but it’s a constant battle.
“And then as soon as they have the device open to do the work, you have to be continually monitoring what they’re doing…”
Students have been sitting in class appearing to be working, but in reality they are shopping online or messaging other students and arranging to meet up in the toilets, for example, the teacher shared.
“The kids are very quick – they do other things and you can’t trust that they’re using the devices [as intended].”
The teacher said she wasn’t convinced that 1:1 devices such as laptop and tablets were effective as a learning tool.
“Are they good? Well, they can be, but they also take away from a lot of learning. Aside from the distraction factor, immediately AI pops up on their device if they’re searching for anything to give them an easy answer.”
Yet it is tricky for teachers to run completely device-free lessons, not least because many textbooks are now in digital-only format, and a variety of marked tasks and assessments are submitted online, too, the teacher flagged.
Students often carry their devices with them having used them in their previous class.
“I find also reading a textbook online is not the same as reading a paper textbook.
“Especially for kids who are weaker, the online textbook is a challenge – they don’t handle it as well as if it’s a paper copy.
“I take a physical textbook to class to give to those students…”
As educational neuroscientist Dr Jared Cooney Horvath warned in his new book The Digital Delusion, reading comprehension is consistently worse on screens than on paper, with effect sizes of –0.15 overall and –0.29 for educational texts.
Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that unlike print, reading from a screen doesn’t provide the kind of spatial anchoring that aids memory consolidation.
Findings from a new study looking at comic stories that compared the cognitive processes that occur when reading from a printed page versus digitally suggest the brain processes information more efficiently via print, with more physical cues to help the reader encode what they have read.
Researchers suggested that printed works provide tactile and spatial cues, such as the thickness of or placement of events on a page, that may better help readers create a mental map of the information.
NSW school leader Rebecca Birch has previously shared her take on the benefits – or lack thereof – of tech for students, concluding “I haven’t been able to make a strong case for a reliance on it for teaching and learning”.
“It’s tempting to draw on the balance fallacy here, but the research is fairly damning. Hours per day online is correlated with loneliness at school (from PISA data), total daily time on screens is correlated with suicide-related outcomes (according to Jean Twenge’s research, which you really should check out), and there are physical effects including on vision, posture and lifestyle.
“The ill-effects on learning run from multitasking, distractions – including for other students – lower test scores, and poorer retention of content,” she wrote in a Substack article.
