During these past few weeks quite a few parents (both of in-person and fully remote students) have reached out expressing concerns about the amount of time students are spending on screen during instructions. This is a legitimate worry, and how to modulate the amount of time our students spend on screen – particularly for our fully remote students – is something all members of the McCall faculty are thinking about. With that being said, I urge all parents and guardians to consider the following factors related to the usage of screen during teachers’ instructional practices.
The Challenge of Promoting Social Interactions While Adhering to Health and Safety Protocols – As all of you know by now, the pandemic has created a world where we all have to social distance, wear masks, and minimize the amount of physical materials we are sharing with each other. These essential safety practices really limit our faculty’s ability to facilitate learning experiences where students and teachers are able to socially engage with each other in meaningful ways. Therefore, teachers are relying on technology to create opportunities for students to collaborate with each other and to participate during instructions. The need to adhere to public health guidelines are also making teachers to rely on digital tools so they can communicate with students and monitor their progress. As McCall teachers work to find that right amount of screen time for your students, I hope all parents and guardians understand that due to the restrictions with which the teachers are working, it is inevitable that all students will be spending more time learning in front of a screen compared to the pre-COVID days.
Not All Screen Time are Equal – Students (and adults) use computers, smart phones, and other devices in a lot of different ways. Dr. Taren Sanders, a health scientist from Australian Catholic University, sorted the ways students use technology into five categories and they are: Passive (e.g., watching a movie), Interactive (e.g., playing a video game), Social (e.g. texting and Tweeting), Education, and Others. As all of you know, students using electronic devices to do homework or Facetime with relatives are engaging in different experiences than using the same devices to watch movies, play Fortnite, or post messages on social media sites. Therefore, if the amount of educational screen time has to increase for the reasons I just mentioned, students will need to decrease the amount of time they are spending in front of screens for the other purposes in order to maintain or decrease their overall screen time. I would like to point out that the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time guidelines changed in 2015. Its recommendation for appropriate screen usage is no longer a set time limit of less than two hours per day. Instead, the AAP is recommending that screen time does not replace children and adolescents’ sleep time and active time. Other recommendations include adults setting no screen time zones such as during meal time and modeling positive screen usage behaviors. I am including an article published by the AAP which includes many of its recommendations on student’s digital usage for your reference. Please click here.
The McCall teachers, staff, and I do recognize the start of the school year involved a lot of screen usage. Much of that is due to the fact that teachers (especially those who teach remote classes) have to have some form of face-to-face connections with the students in order to establish relationships with them. A lot of the screen usage during the start of the school year is also to make sure students are learning how to use the digital tools that will be part of the courses throughout the school year.
COVID-19 is causing all of us to adjust and sometimes fundamentally change our practices. While we are navigating through the pandemic, we will frequently find that effective educational practices are at odds with public health and safety protocols. During these situations it is natural for us to lament what we are no longer able to do. However, we should also consider that many of the changes we have to make for our new normal are actually good changes. For example, pre-recorded lessons are benefiting students who struggles with keeping up with the fast pace of live direct instructions. Digital tools such as Padlet is allowing students who used to be hesitant about raising their hands to participate more in their remote lessons. These are practices I would encourage McCall teachers and staff to keep when we are able to return to full in-person schooling
