I gave my students iPads. They stopped talking to each other.
by Launa Hall
launa
Hall Lives In Northern Virginia And Is Working On A Book Of Essays About
Teaching.
| December 13, 2015, 12:01AM
I placed an iPad into the outstretched hands of each
of my third-grade students, and a reverent, tech-induced hush
descended on our classroom. We were circled together on our gathering rug, just
finished with a conversation about “digital citizenship” and “online safety”
and “our school district bought us these iPads to help us learn, so we are
using them for learning purposes.” They’d nodded vigorously, thrilled by the
thought of their very own iPads to take home every night and bring to school
every day. Some of them had never touched a tablet before, and I watched them
cradle the sleek devices in their arms. They flashed their gap-toothed grins —
not at each other but at their shining screens.
That was the first of many moments when I wished I could send the
iPads back.
Some adult ears might welcome a room of hushed 8-year-olds, but
teachers of young children know that the chatter in a typical elementary
classroom is what makes it a good place to learn. Yes, it’s sometimes too loud.
These young humans are not great conversationalists. They are often hurting
someone’s feelings or getting hurt, misunderstanding or overreacting or
completely missing the point. They need time to learn communication skills —
how to hold your own and how to get along with others. They need to talk and
listen and talk some more at school, both with peers and with adults who can
model conversation skills.
The iPads subtly undermined that important work. My lively
little kids stopped talking and adopted the bent-neck, plugged-in posture of
tap, tap, swipe.
My colleagues and I had tried to anticipate all sorts of
issues before the new one-to-one tablet initiative rolled into our third-grade
classrooms last year. What happens if the children lose them? Break them?
Forget their passwords? How will we clean the screens? Charge them all at once?
Which lessons lend themselves well to iPads, and which ones don’t? We had
meetings, made plans and did our best to embrace the new — both because we had
a sense of the potential and because asking questions about the efficacy of
one-to-one classrooms (with a computing device for each child), or wondering
aloud whether more tech for little kids was supported by research, was not only
unwelcome, it was illogical. The money was spent (more than $100,000 for each
grade), and the iPads were happening.
Our planning helped, but there was so much we didn’t anticipate:
alarms going off randomly throughout the day, bandwidth issues that slowed our
lessons to a crawl, username issues followed by password issues followed by
hundreds of selfies. All these things sucked instructional time. This at a
school serving many students new to English or otherwise behind in
their communication skills. They couldn’t afford to lose a single minute of
learning. So I wrote lessons two ways: one in case enough iPads were working
and one if too many weren’t. I tried to harness the benefits and overcome the
avalanche of distracting minutiae the devices brought.
Veteran teachers of tablet-friendly classrooms will tell you that
these were simply rollout problems. They may mention how tablets can help
teachers tailor lessons to each child, or how they can provide an instant
snapshot into whether a child understood a concept. They talk about apps that
connect classmates to one another and to students across the globe,
that foster creativity and a sense of newness that makes over a stale
classroom.
Those early-adopter teachers are right: Tablets are portals to a
million possibilities. Even with my rookie stumbles, my students did
wonderful things. They made faux commercials that aired on our school’s morning
news; they recorded themselves explaining math problems; they produced movies
about explorers, complete with soundtracks. I recorded mini-lessons for my students to
watch at home, so we could “flip our classroom” and discuss the information in
small groups the next day. And I knew we were just getting started.
But did the benefits offset what was lost?
Sherry Turkle, the author of “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power
of Talk in a Digital Age,” writes about how we are sacrificing connections, one
quick check of our screens at a time. Her research finds that college students,
with their ubiquitous phones, “are having a hard time with the give-and-take of
face-to-face conversation.” Eight-year-olds with iPads have the same struggles,
minus any filters or perspective people might gain as they age. At the same
time I was trying to encourage my students to appreciate the
subtleties of human interaction, the iPads I gave them threatened to
overwhelm their understanding.
Turkle writes that just the presence of a phone, even one turned
off or flipped over on the table between speakers, gets in the way of
conversations — we only bother with discussions we don’t mind interrupting.
Switch the setting to a classroom, and we may only engage in learning that we
don’t mind interrupting. And it can be hard for kids to sustain their attention
in a small group discussion when their own personal portal beckons from the
back of the room.
One of my saddest days in my digital classroom
was when the children rushed in from the lunchroom one rainy recess and dashed
for their iPads. Wait, I implored, we play with Legos on rainy days! I dumped
out the huge container of Legos that were pure magic just a couple of weeks
ago, that prompted so much collaboration and conversation, but the delight was
gone. My students looked at me with disdain, and some crossed
their arms and pouted. We aren’t kids who just play anymore, their crossed arms
implied. We’re iPad users. We’re tech-savvy. Later, when I allowed
their devices to hum to glowing life, conversation shut down altogether.
I knew that the lure of the screen would continue at home each
night. Many of the students had screens at home already, but this one
was different: It was their very own, it was portable, and it carried the stamp
of approval of teacher, school and district. Do the adults in their homes still
feel the authority to tell them to put that screen away and go outside and
play?
Districts all over the country are buying into one-to-one initiatives,
and for younger and younger students. These screens have been rebranded
“digital learning devices,” carrying the promise of education success for
millions of our communities’ education dollars. Yet there is some evidence that
tablets can be detrimental to learning.
A study released in September by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development looked at school tech initiatives in more than
three dozen countries (although not the United States) and found that
while students who use computers moderately show modest gains over
those who rarely do, heavy technology use has a negative impact. “Students who
use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning
outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics,”
the report concluded.
We have also known for years — at least since the 2012 report
“Facing the Screen Dilemma” from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood —
that screen time for younger children in particular comes with a huge opportunity
cost, depriving them of hands-on learning, time outdoors and “face-to-face
interactions with caring adults.” Digital-savvy parents in Silicon Valley made
news way back in 2011 for enrolling their children in steadfastly screen-free
schools. They knew that their kids would be swiping and clicking soon enough,
but there are only a limited number of childhood years when it’s not only
really fun to build with Legos, it’s also really good for you.
Some proponents of one-to-one initiatives portray “analog classrooms”
as gray spaces where bored teachers hand worksheets to uninspired kids — and
tablets are the energizing cure. The One-to-One Institute, a nonprofit that
helps school districts go digital, says on its website: “Research is clear that
to ensure student success, education must move from a teacher-centric
to a learner-centric approach. One-to-one programs create the opportunity for
authentic personalization of teaching and learning for each student.”
But jumping from the “sage on the stage” teaching model to a
screen for each kid skips over critical territory in between, where children
learn from, and build their social skills with, one another. Classrooms run by
worksheets won’t be magically transformed with tablets, and classrooms where
teachers skillfully engage their students don’t need screens — and
the extra baggage they introduce — to get great results.
Teachers striving to preserve precious space for conversation are
not lazy, or afraid of change, or obstructionist. They believe that if our dining
tables should be protected for in-depth discussion and focused attention, so,
too, should our classrooms. They know that their youngstudents live in the
digital age, but the way children learn has not evolved so very fast. Kids
still have to use their five senses, and, most of all, they have to talk to
each other.
My students already had so many challenges and so much
ground to cover. We put tablets in their hands and made their loads that much
heavier.
Launa Hall lives in Northern Virginia and is working on a book of
essays about teaching. From the Washington Post.
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