Week 3 — Laptops And Phones In The Classroom: Yea, Nay Or A Third Way?

I am a big advocate of a shared responsibility model in a class room setting where individual students and teachers share equal responsibility of the failure and success of the classroom (including individual success/failure of students). I personally think that utilization of all forms of personal technology should be banned from classrooms (my perception takes its genesis from old school of thinking) simply because surfing the web not only distracts individual students but also distracts their neighbors and this distraction propagates like a ripple effect. Following are more reasons why I think personal technology should be banned from classroom:

1. According to a study conducted by microsoft, average attention span has reduced to eight seconds, beating goldfish’s attention span of 9 seconds. If unrestricted use of technology is allowed, then the matters would only become worse. Class room is one realm of the life where people do most of their learning, and learning to have better attention spans can be helpful to students in future.
2. The class room setting is a time for face to face interaction amongst students, usage of technology diminishes this time to almost zero. Additionally, this diminishing social interaction is increasingly generating more anti-social human beings with a skewed perception of social normality.
3. Excessive use of technology has increased mental health related problems. I think the class room can be the one place where students get a “break” from using technology and increase physical (not virtual) social interaction.
4. Using phones/laptops, when a teacher is lecturing, for social media or for other entertainment purposes is extremely disrespectful. Condoning such behaviors on a regular basis creates a perception of normality — which is not in accordance with expectations in the industry. Let me share a personal incident: During my internship in summer 2018, some of my fellow interns were using phones during client meetings. After various failed insinuations, the meeting host, out of frustration, explicitly told the interns to put their phones away as this action was disrespectful. A fellow intern responded to this “order” by saying I can multi-task and continued to use their phone. Following this interns lead, some of the other interns continued using laptops/phones — I was appalled by this behavior and the utter disrespect for the client, the company, and the meeting host (higher up) without any signs of remorse. I think this behavior can be ascribed to normalization of technology use in the classroom setting.

Times are changing, so are teaching techniques and learning methodologies. Consequentially, an absolute ban of technology is not pragmatic in todays “modern” class room. Howbeit, I think that using tools to limit the sites a student can access is a reasonable solution to:

1. The need for students to have access to technology to be successful in a class.
2. Stop students from using social media, so they don’t distract themselves or their neighbors, for the period of class.
3. Encourage student interaction

The article cites Jesse Stommels’ quote: “I don’t think the attention of students is actually something teachers can or should control,” and I couldn’t disagree more. Saying that teachers should not take action to make students better human beings is akin to saying that the doctor should not be controlling the patients prescription. The job of the teacher is to teach students class material, teach them something about life, and help them be a better version of themselves. If students are distracted then how is the teacher supposed to do their job? These children are still learning. This is the time when a person with much more life experience than students should navigate them through right and wrong.