As an occasional substitute teacher for middle- and high-schoolers in Nova Scotia, Kim Herrick often gets a front-row seat seeing how teens use tech at school.
Whether students are tasked with assignments, work for another class or granted free time, Herrick regularly sees them checking Snapchat, TikTok or Instagram accounts, shopping online, gaming or even trading Bitcoin — easily bypassing school board security methods aimed at blocking such use.
The ubiquity of students engaging in non-educational online activities — and the futile attempts to clamp down on it — have contributed to her view that we need to reconsider the tech used by default in classes today.
But the alarm bells really started going off for Herrick when she discovered her elder daughter — who’s starting Grade 2 this fall — has had a school Google account for three years, without Herrick knowing. Herrick said she couldn’t log into the account and school officials said she couldn’t opt-out or have it deleted, saying it was necessary for access to educational apps and “a requirement” for learning.
We have hundreds of years of going to school as humans, Herrick said. “We do not need a Google account to learn.”
Many parents, educators, advocacy groups and experts are pushing back against the amount of screen time in schools and the prevalence of tech tools woven into the current education system, with some making links to a range of woes, from behavioural issues to distracted students to data breaches that put youngsters’ privacy at risk.
Yet a rollback to classroom practices of the past isn’t the answer to the current “techlash,” say some education experts, who favour intentional and thoughtful use of technology as the way forward.
Tom D’Amico, recently retired director of education for the Ottawa Catholic School Board, explains a movement pushing back and questioning device and technology use in schools.
Changing approach to tech in education
For years, a one-to-one student-to-device ratio, web access and learning through game-like applications have been seen as symbols of educational progress. But amid a worldwide push to reduce teen smartphone and social media use, a vocal wave of parent groups — including Skills Before Screens in Canada, the U.K.-based Close Screen Open Minds, as well as Schools Beyond Screens and ScreenSense in the U.S. — is broadening this scrutiny to encompass educational tech usage more generally.
After having prioritized digital schooling for the past decade, for instance, Sweden has recently shifted back toward physical textbooks, pen-and-paper homework, reinvesting in libraries and screen-free classrooms (particularly for younger students), citing falling scores on international assessments.
Poor reading scores have tech-friendly Norway making a similar return to physical books in its schools, as well as introducing a near-ban on Generative AI usage in elementary, with restrictions for high-schoolers.
In the U.S., parental demands have led to stricter tech policies at the country’s two largest school boards. The Los Angeles Unified School District has already started the school year with limits on screen time in every grade, including a total device ban before Grade 2. On the opposite coast, New York is restricting one-to-one device time for Grade 2 and below and suggesting caps for older elementary students. It’s also halting student-facing Generative AI use through Grade 8 and limiting use for high schoolers, for now.
Herrick says many parents, such as herself, are in the dark about the screens and apps their youngsters access in class, let alone what the responsible use or data privacy agreements are regarding those apps and school accounts.
Beyond privacy, the mother of two and former wilderness leadership educator in the U.S. is also concerned about what unfettered school tech use means for the long term.
She worries about susceptibility to distraction — she’s had secondary students claim they’re multitasking as they juggle a bevy of browser tabs, apps or screens — not to mention negative impacts on their mental and physical health down the road.
In the meantime, overreliance on tech also bogs down educators’ precious time with policing student usage and dealing with tech support, rather than teaching, Herrick said.
Intention versus novelty
Classroom tech use varies across Canadian regions, schools and educators, but it’s indeed integrated into teaching today, according to Johanathan Woodworth, an assistant professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.
Whether teachers are getting students to research a project online, study the solar system via a virtual reality simulator or test out an AI chatbot, Woodworth emphasizes that tech use must be intentional, thoughtful and directly connected to the skills students are expected to learn.
“A lot of times teachers use technology in the classroom because of the novelty effect and engagement — but the novelty effect wears off,” Woodworth said from Halifax, where he teaches educational technology to existing and prospective teachers.
“The first step is to think about ‘Do I even need to use it? What is the purpose of me using it? Does it actually help me in my classroom?'”
It’s important teachers are supported with guidelines and enough training on how to carefully and effectively use technology, he says, in order to understand it and, in turn, teach and model that knowledge to their students.
Striving for balance
Rolling back to no-tech classrooms isn’t necessarily the answer either, Woodworth said, since a main reason schools employ tech today — text-to-speech and speech-to-text applications, for instance — is to accommodate students with disabilities.
Schools must balance “purposeful” tech use with the need to prep students for a tech-filled world, while also ensuring it’s “not used as a distraction,” according to education consultant Tom D’Amico, former director of education of the Ottawa Catholic School Board.
He says the concerns raised by parents — both the ones driving the current “techlash” and those pushing for their kids to build tech skills — are contributing to a “balanced and focused” approach by school boards.
In his current work advising school districts across Canada about artificial intelligence, D’Amico says he’s noticing a shift: schools taking a more developmentally and age-informed approach to technology.
For instance, “that means regardless of the province, you’re looking at the earliest grades not having a lot of device time, but still getting AI literacy. They still need to learn about digital citizenship, what it means to use a computer,” he said, noting gradual introduction of more technology in middle and high school.
“Critical thinking can be [taught] without the technology as well in the early ages,” D’Amico added, emphasizing that this learning must be “embedded in the curriculum, so it happens every single year, in an age-appropriate manner.”
Ultimately, he says, the top focus of schools should be student learning and strengthening students’ connections with teachers and their classmates.
“What’s the number one technology in a classroom? It’s the student and their brain,” he said.
