Edward F. Berger, retired educator now living in Arizona and fighting the good fight against the forces of reaction, writes here about screen addiction. Having reviewed the research, he questions whether addition to screens damages frontal lobe development.
Actually, the link will take you to his podcast, which is gaining international recognition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know, but if public schools spend a bundle on ed tech and then regret it I and every other citizen will not blame the ed tech marketers or ed reformers who pushed it, they will blame public schools.
So don’t make dumb investments based on hype because all these merry marketers will be down the road and you’ll be stuck explaining why you fell for it.
Let the buyer beware. Public schools are BIG buyers. Ed tech should be chasing you and begging for your business, not the other way around. Use your leverage. This is a multi-billion dollar market and they want it. Make them provide value or take a pass.
Does anyone ever ask children if they want more screen time in school? I know it’s used as a marketing tool for parents- their children will never get a job unless they use an Ipad in preschool, but are children clamoring for “dashboards”?
I just get no sense from my school child that he’s feeling horribly impoverished because he doesn’t take an online quiz every 15 minutes. Who, exactly, wants this? Other than the burgeoning ed tech industry, I mean.
Diane,please share this petition by an addiction expert/psychologist/author to pass a law to put warning labels on the digital screen devices that kids use.Dr. Nicholas Karadas is the author if the book, Glow Kids. A documentary based on his book is in the works as you read this.
https://www.change.org/p/u-s-congress-and-senate-pass-law-to-put-warning-labels-on-the-digital-screen-devices-that-kids-use
“The tech companies have sold the false narrative that video games and screen devices are “educational” while several comprehensive studies have failed to prove any educational benefit. Instead, profit has driven the $60 billion dollar “education technology” industry that has allowed these digital Trojan horses that contain the potential for clinical and developmental disorders to slip into our homes and into our children’s classrooms. As in cigarette labeling, enacting legislation to put warning labels on electronic screens will help give parents the awareness of just how serious of a health issue this screen epidemic really is.”
Interesting idea to put warning labels on devices. I don’t think it will do a thing to curb screen use by kids. I don’t think the parents will believe it one bit that screens have a detrimental effect on their kids. We’ve already gone down the road where parents are giving their babies (I mean that literally.) phones and pads and laptops. The erroneous belief that technology is progress is deeply ingrained in us and ain’t nothin’ gonna take it away now!
The tech industry doesn’t care about brain development in our children. The warning label is step one in creating awareness.
Parents want the best for their kids and when they learn the actual facts, they may want to limit screen time in schools. It exceeds all recommendations.
I don’t know? I bought the Baby Einstein videos when my kids were small. Did I believe they were going to make my children genius’s….NO. I bought them because they were more educational than traditional cartoons when I needed a “mommy break” and Sesame street wasn’t available. I don’t think parents really think that this stuff makes their kids any smarter, just more computer literate. I don’t think parents know just how much screen time this involves in schools considering that parents have been forced out of the equation. I for one despise the 1:1 IPad program in my kids MS and would love for the whole thing to go away, yet other parents love that they don’t have to purchase an IPad for school?
“Damaging Frontal Lobe Development: THE END OF EMPATHY?”
Now we have an explanation for why Trump is Trump. He brags he doesn’t read. He watched endless Alt-Right hate media TV for his intelligence briefings.
It is good to see some international research on this issue of the “glow kids.”
Here in Trump-land we should also be concerned about the loss of privacy for all activity on the Internet, including mobile devices the Internet enables, and a slew of other devices such as those for games, household alarm systems, and the like.
Without much publicity, Trump and Congress have dumped privacy rules governing ISPs–Internet service providers. ISPs collect huge amounts of data about the websites you visit, your posts on Twitter and Facebook, your purchases on sites such as Amazon, your online financial accounts, online paths to your medical records and everything else.
When parents plug a pre-schooler into a home computer, pad, or mobile device, the ISP can develop a profile on everything the child is doing and sell that information. The ISP can connect the child’s data with all of the parent’s data that may be on the same computer.
Just to be clear, ISPs are the providers of broadband Internet access service, mobile, and other telecommunications services. On April 3, 2017, Trump signed into law Senate Joint Resolution 34 (S. J. Res. 34), a measure that allows Internet service providers such as AT&T/Direct TV, Century Link, Comcast/Xfinity, Cox Communications, Frontier, Time Warner/Spectrum, Verizon and hundreds of others to operate without privacy rules.
S. J. Res. 34 killed the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) privacy rules set forth during the Obama Administration in Public Law No: 115-22: “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.”
Moreover, the FCC rule that Trump and supporters killed was signed under the Congressional Review Act, which means that the FCC cannot restore those dead-in-the-water privacy rules in the future. Here is the bottom line.
Broadband Internet access services, mobile, and other telecommunications services are no longer required to protect the privacy of your data.
Your ISP is free to harvest, store, share, and sell your confidential information.
Your ISP is not required to offer you a way to opt-in or opt-out of data sharing.
Your ISPs does not need to inform you about its provision for data security or to notify you about breaches in its security.
Your ISP can tell you that, in order to obtain services, you must surrender your privacy rights.
Your ISP has a right to use your confidential information without disclosing that use or asking for your consent, or offering to pay you for that information.
In theory, the Children’s Online Computer Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) takes care of Internet privacy issues for children under the age of 13. I cannot fathom how COPPA works now that ISP privacy has been killed, and by all accounts for the purpose of allowing ISPs to make money from their data, just like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many webpages you visit. Here is the difference. You volunteer to visit all of those websites: You may have only a few choices in ISPs. In many parts of the country there is only one ISP, a monopoly on services. I am not a lawyer, but if you are interested in the latest version of COPPA (2014) you can read it here https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/312.2
If you are a techie, you might think there is a work-around the privacy loss. This article casts some doubt on the ease of managing any workaround and the costs. The article also warns about the scammers that are taking advantage of this workaround because harvesting your data and selling it is still possible and lucrative. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403388,00.asp
I’ll preface this by stating that most of the information I’m currently typing (during my lunch break while students are away) is anecdotal.
This is an interesting podcast. I had a conversation with my 11th grade grade level English class concerning Sean Spicer today. We viewed what he said about Hitler, his apology, and finally, the Saturday Night Live skit with Melissa McCarthy as “Spicey,” which, as a side note, made me guffaw and snort with laughter for several minutes. I attempt to scaffold my lessons in a way that students understand the differences between parody and satire. While I explained part of what happened with Spicer last week, my students discussed the implications of the media giving us a constant feed to the foibles of society. We spoke of their love of books until, and I’m giving an approximation here because I asked everyone the same question, around age 11– the age in which most got a cellphones. Many of the students explained that books, and I shudder to type this, “makes you think,” while phones are a way to get quick information with commentary that tells you what to think.
As Holli Henley points out, kids have a fear of “missing out” on the happenings around school, town, their community, the world, etc. The conundrum as an ELA teacher comes in myriad waves for me. I must teach my students to use computers and the dreaded screen as a means to proficiency in a multimodal world. Similarly, students now test largely on computers. To a large degree, I think this relegates paper copies of books and pencils and paper and all of those things most of hold dear. Students now, it seems, do find their self worth from a computer screen, and this saddens me enormously.
Thanks for turning me onto this podcast, Dr. Ravitch.
You might want to look at this article by Rachel Becker: It helps to give a different perspective on technology and brain development.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/30/12715848/new-york-post-internet-texting-addiction-irresponsible-hysteria
Where she notes “The tech-as-addiction metaphor is sloppy, though it might not be wrong. The problem is we don’t have a good handle on what qualifies as tech addiction — if it exists at all, how common it is, and what kind of environmental and physiological conditions predispose someone to it.” And “Kardaras didn’t contribute his conclusions to the scientific body of evidence whatsoever. Searching a database of the academic literature for “Nicholas Kardaras”, “Nick Kardaras”, and “N Kardaras” doesn’t turn up a single peer-reviewed publication about tech addiction, internet addiction, or psychology. That means that while the claims given weight by a ‘PhD’ following Kardaras’ name are out there to frighten parents, he’s never submitted them for other scientists and clinicians to evaluate.”
“The problem is we don’t have a good handle on what qualifies as tech addiction…”
Well, let’s see. When kids can’t sit for 40 minutes without thinking about their phones. When they have panic attacks (literally) because they can’t have their phones on their bodies during class. When kids become violent and belligerent when their phones are taken away. I would call that addiction, and I don’t need an “expert” or a research paper to tell me so.
“When kids can’t sit still for 40 minutes.”
I taught for thirty years and retired in 2005. Most of my students couldn’t sit still for 10 –
15 minutes because they were programmed by TV commercials to lose interest the minute the commercial came on and then re-focus once the regular program came back on to grab their attention for a few more minutes. But TV programs don’t challenge them to think critically and/or to solve problems.
Many of the children I taught expected to be entertained and weren’t interested in learning because of the process of learning, to them, was often boring when they had to actually think.
Some students were told by their parents that if the teacher was boring, they didn’t have to cooperate.
To overcome this double barrel challenge, I came up with the 15-minute rule. Change lessons every 15 minutes and break longer lessons up sort of like the episodes in a TV series and use different teaching modalities for each 15-minute segment. That doesn’t mean I let my students take a commercial break every 15 minutes. that means I changed to a different lesson every 15 minutes to keep the students interested. The next day, we’d start episode 2 or 3 or 4 and then every 15 minutes change to another episode 2 or 3 or 4 in other lessons. Instead of teaching long lessons on one focused subject, I taught three a day and started episode two for all those lessons the next day.
That tactic worked for most of my students and they even had larger average gains in standardized test scores, year-after-year for decades, than students in comparable classes that were focused on one lesson a day.
I like that, Lloyd. Good that you had administrators who’d allow it, that late in the game. Things started getting dicey with my autonomy around 2000, when Bloomberg took office.
The administrators didn’t know what I was doing. They seldom came into my classroom. They didn’t care to learn what I was doing that caused the standardized student test scores to be higher, on average, than all the other teachers that taught the same subject and grade level in all three of the district’s high schools.
The administrators cared about three things:
teachers should not write many referrals for disruptive behavior. If a teacher wrote many referrals, then the teacher didn’t know how to control their students.
The result, teachers that felt bullied and angry stopped writing referrals and their classrooms turned into the wild-wild west. Admisntrators didn’t know what was going on. They were just happy that there were so many great teachers motivating their students to learn.
teachers should not fail students. the more students a teacher fails, that was evidence the teacher didn’t know how to teach or motivate their students to learn.
The result, too many teachers started giving students passing grades that were not earned to keep the failure rate down. The reason teachers did this was so they wouldn’t be called in to be lectured about their failures. Teachers that did this soon discovered they would not be called in and blamed for all the failing grades. The students didn’t change. The teachers changed.
the overall test score average must improve every year – no excuse. If the average isn’t higher every year, that is the teacher’s fault. They can’t motivate the students or don’t know how to teach.
Well, that’s a good article, I agree. But we have the 50 year old saying “The media is the message.” which originates with McLuhan.
Hence in Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society’s values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions[5] that we are not aware of.
When I tell my daughter that she is on the phone too much, she defends herself by talking about the content “But dad, I am checking what’s home work, and do research for it on google.” And then I cannot continue with “why not use the computer then” since it appears silly, since the phone is also a computer. It’s difficult to say what I really think that “my problem is, actually, with the medium you use, the darn phone.”, because I sound hopelessly old fashioned instead of rational.
But let’s make it clear
It’s the medium, stupid.
Yes.
I think it’s worth mentioning that the expert who is interviewed in these three podcasts was a middle school teacher for 20+ years.
I think this is a better, more direct link to the podcasts.
http://insightsintoeducation.libsyn.com/
I was listening to an NPR clip featuring Zuckerberg at the F8 conference, touting the future of Facebook.
A chief part of his presentation was the future of virtual reality headsets, both alone and combined with the cameras attached to whatever device was being used to access FB.
One example of this was to think how much fun it would be for the kids, at breakfast, to don a virtual headset and watch sharks and fishies swimming around in their cereal.
This is the absolute last thing I’d want to see, first thing in the morning, from my kid.
I was the tech for all of our sites for over a decade. I helped to usher in technology as an integral part of our school day curriculum. But I don’t like what I’m seeing, now. I share Berger’s concerns, and info like this from billionaire Zuckerman along with the big push for even more tech in the classroom makes me that much more apprehensive.
Even if there is no physical effect to the brain (which is a real concern, the idea that all aspects of life are “better” with technology added is not, to my view, a healthy one.
“Too much screen time for kids?”
Worried about the screen addiction?
Put a chip inside their head
Game and iPhone interdiction:
Chip in head until they’re dead
Zuckerberg has stated that the future of FB is in virtual reality helmets and device cameras. He used the example of seeing your kid enjoy his/her cereal in the morning, laughing at the little sharks playing around in the bowl.
The evidence points towards physical brain damage, but even without these warnings, there’s just something “not right” about making tech the “go-to” for enjoyment.
I think the argument over technology and teens being in front of screens is one that is tired and played out. Of course, for the health of our children and adolescents technology is doing them no favors but at this point in time, they need to grow up being familiarized with it. If we isolate children in classrooms by preserving education practices that were in place before technology came about then we are just holding students back from jumping right into the real world once they leave school. Whether we like it or not, the world is changing. Technology is in almost everything we do and the only way to be successful in this world is to adapt to it. With that being said, I absolutely hate technology. But I am not blinded to the reality of its usage. It has its issues but overall, it has given our society the opportunity to evolve more than it already is. Our children deserve to be apart of that evolution as well. We should not hold them back, but rather help them to embrace the times they live in. Instead of feeling anxious or worried about technology taking over, take the time to educate your students on the healthy balance of technology use and remembering that we are human beings with a tie to Mother Earth. It is beneficial to be up to date on technological brilliance but it is even more important to put the laptop down every once in a while and enjoy what is naturally around us so that we do not forget about it and lose it.