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By Michael Zwaagstra
Ontario politicians, trustees and school administrators have finally realized that smartphones don’t belong in schools. When kids go back to school this week, students from kindergarten to Grade 6 will not be allowed to use their phones during the school day. Grade 7-12 students may use their phones during breaks but must turn them off during class time. Other provinces have enacted similar restrictions and public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for banning phones in schools.
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Ontario’s education system still has a huge blind spot, however. Even some school boards that have finally started to restrict phone use in classrooms are spending millions of dollars buying Chromebooks and tablets as if students can’t learn without using an electronic device.
In 2021 the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) launched its “1:1 Student Device Program.” Every year, this program provides all Grade 5 and 9 students with a personal Chromebook. According to the TDSB website, this device “will stay with them over a four-year period, 24/7” — in other words, even while they aren’t at school.
Although the TDSB installed filters on each Chromebook to block inappropriate websites, tech-savvy students have already figured out how to circumvent the restrictions. Which means that instead of being distracted by their phones, students will be distracted by their board-issued Chromebooks. According to the latest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests, there’s a strong association between poor math scores and distraction caused by electronic devices, including tablets and laptops.
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This problem has been building for years, but the pandemic accelerated the technology craze. During mandated school closures, school boards rushed to get tablets, iPads and Chromebooks into the hands of as many students as possible. While remote learning might have been a temporary necessity in the early days of COVID, it clearly was not a substitute for in-person learning. Many skills are learned better without electronic devices.
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology that compared the brain activity of children writing by hand with that of children who were typing, found that writing produced far more brain activity. Handwriting evidently engages a person’s thinking in much more complex ways than typing on a keyboard. Dr. Hetty Roessingh, professor emerita at the University of Calgary and an expert in language and literacy, has conducted extensive research in this field. She has found that handwriting helps young students recognize letter shapes and plays a fundamental role in their development as readers. No amount of time spent on a tablet can make up for this valuable learning experience.
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Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that technology is prohibitively expensive. Considering how often school boards complain about insufficient funding, it’s strange that they would embark on such costly technology programs. While there may be a reasonable case for providing high school students with Chromebooks, younger students are a different matter.
Smartphone restrictions are a good start. Now we should start weaning students, particularly in younger grades, off their Chromebooks, tablets and iPads. Too much technology in the classroom damages their ability to learn.
Financial Post
Michael Zwaagstra, a public high school teacher, is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.
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