On school phone bans and inescapable screens

When I started teaching at Glens Falls High School in 2018, the district was in the process of implementing a 1:1 Chromebook plan. Every student would have their own device to keep during the school year. At the time, I wondered if all students were ready for this responsibility (I once saw an eighth grade student walking down the hallway, gripping a laptop by the screen as a wired mouse bounced behind him). But for teachers wanting to use technology in the classroom, 1:1 devices seemed simpler than the laptop carts I had used in other schools. It was also good to know that all students would have access to a laptop at home, not just those families that could afford to purchase one for family use.

Seven years—and a pandemic—later, the technology landscape is quite different. Although many families might not have a home computer or laptop, almost all households have internet-connected smartphones. Internet access is no longer a luxury; even families living in poverty prioritize functioning smartphones. Most school districts have moved to a 1:1 device model and even very young kids have been given laptops to use both inside and outside of school. Students in our school now need Chromebooks to manage classroom assignments (Google Classroom and Google Docs), correspond with teachers (Gmail), watch instructional videos (EdPuzzle), and make digital passes to leave the classroom (Securlypass). As teachers, we use websites and software to manage attendance, hall passes, and occasional Google Meets. I probably have at least 20 other sites that I use regularly for various instructional purposes. And of course, there's software to try to monitor student use of all this technology.

New York State recently banned students from using connected devices like smartphones in school. This legislation was an important step forward in helping young people focus in school and its implementation has proven smoother than many expected. However, it doesn't change the fact that students still spend large portions of their school day using screens. As this New York Times article explores, teachers are cognizant of the benefits and tradeoffs of our new arrangement. Personally, I rely on Chromebooks for part of my instructional approach and many of my students treat their Chromebooks like educational tools. But the devices can be just as distracting as phones. Games and videos are the biggest culprits. Our IT team can't keep up with the tricks that students are always finding to access blocked sites. Below are a few screenshots from our monitoring program. The mix of academic and illicit sites is representative of what you'll see if you peek over almost any kid's shoulder:

By now, we should have learned not to underestimate the ability of teenagers to get to where they want to go on the internet. The struggle between IT departments and savvy students is an endless game of whack-a-mole in which internet-native students are perpetually pressing the advantage.

A student on my caseload recently had a fairly serious technological infraction (he was trying to print porn from his school device and wouldn't have been caught if it weren't for a vigilant librarian). As a consequence, he was put in a digital "penalty box" and was only able to access websites from a select list. Because the videos we use for instruction are uploaded to YouTube first before being linked to EdPuzzle, these videos were blocked along with instructional resources for his science class. I spent a frustrating few weeks using time-consuming workarounds to get him access to what he needed. My interactions with our IT team and administration around this case were eye-opening. I was told that the only way to fully prevent a student from getting to illicit sites was to preapprove certain sites while blocking all others by default. Since so many sites in our educational ecosystem are interconnected, it's challenging to allow students access to what they need while also blocking prohibited sites.

I eventually made the case to my administrators that, after a reasonable punitive period, it was no longer fair to disconnect a student from academic resources they needed. It was our district's choice to fully integrate almost every aspect of teaching and learning with digital access. In my opinion, the fact that there is no way to adequately police student use of the internet (that we have encouraged them to access in school) is mostly a failing of the adults.

I've found that separating myself from attention-sucking technology for periods of time is the only sure way to keep myself from overusing it. For this reason, I am a huge fan of the statewide cell phone ban. I also believe that we need to reconsider how we use Chromebooks in school. Some of this is already happening, as the temptation to use AI is necessitating a return to blue books for written tests. I suggest that administrators and school leaders consider the potential attentional penalty that we pay whenever we tie a school experience or function more tightly to devices. The cost of maintaining, repairing, and regularly replacing hundreds of Chromebooks is also significant. It's possible that all the costs are worth it. But I wonder if we are complacently continuing down a path that we started down out of necessity during the pandemic years. Perhaps a return to the classroom laptop cart wouldn't be so bad after all?