Digital Downside

Post date: Nov 15, 2015 2:44:18 AM

Digital Downside: No attention span, Hypervigilant, and No Delayed Gratification

Blog Post for the week of November 14, 2015

I’ve been a teacher for 25 years; I think I’m a great teacher and expect my students to listen and be ready to participate. While many of my friends have complained about cell phone use in the classroom, I was not seeing a big problem—until recently. Now, as I walk in the door of the classroom, I can see heads looking down at the small screen with thumbs flying.

I have three different classes face to face: one class (Intro to Literature) takes a very active learning approach with at least 75% of our time doing small group discussion of the reading selections followed by a few comments from me. Whenever I mention a worksheet or writing assignment has been graded, students are whipping out their smartphones to check for scores.

I use a lot of video in the class, and post a lot of links to literature sources online; I also send weekly email messages that preview the week. I’ve taken a set of iPads in a few times to do research, look at cool Poetry Apps, and give them a different way to respond to the reading: that day I let them take their pick of a whiteboard app, where they could draw a picture to respond to the poetry, or the notebook app, to write a few sentences. My point is that I am enthusiastic about technology, love this class content, and have great students, but I am seeing more students seeming to struggle to keep their hands off their phones in class.

Two other classes meet in computer classrooms, and I teach two sections online. I’ve seen a rather interesting trend in the computer classroom that I use for Composition 2, an advanced writing class. Each student has his or her smartphone on the desk near the keyboard: one day, I saw a student had two phones, and when I joked with him about it, discovered one was a work phone. They are not necessarily on their phones a great deal, but from time to time I see them look at it, and some are obviously distracted by alerts to new texts or tweets because they will look up to see if I’m paying attention and send a quick message.

This semester I have had several startling conversations with a handful of students who have confessed they are struggling with college, having a hard time paying attention in class, and not able to focus on their homework for long. The first girl confessed to me that her High School had been early adopters of the One to One program—giving every student and teacher a shiny new laptop. She had been thrilled and quickly found herself on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, where she had organized ideas for decorating rooms; unfortunately, her homework was always last on the list.

She ended up flunking a class and lost out on an opportunity that meant a great deal to her. It also woke her up to her own role in the problem. Her school had rushed into the implementation without a lot of planning, and teachers were not prepared or trained and things were chaotic in the early days. Some teachers had no idea what to do while others jumped in and tried to make things work; however, a lot of time was lost to technology snafus, and students took advantage of that to waste time on social media, surfing the web, or watching YouTube.

This was not what I wanted or hoped to hear! I love using technology in the classroom; however, there has to be structure, a workflow, expectations, and tech support. However, as I began doing conferences over the “big” essay, I heard variations of this story several more times, and my concerns grew. Several students used almost the same words to describe the battle in their minds for getting organized, getting homework done, and staying off social media and/or their phones in class and later at home, while they were supposedly studying.

My third class is one for the Education students that teaches them how to integrate technology in the classroom: we also meet in a computer classroom. Almost every Wednesday I bring in the iPad cart, and we explore Apps for their Thematic Units: a set of five lessons that incorporates various kinds of technology. When I brought up the experiences that the other students had shared, several nodded because they had seen and heard much of the same in their local school districts. We talked again about the barriers to success: failure to plan, failure to include those most responsible for the pilot (the teachers), and failure to figure out how to adapt curriculum and workflow. While some students reported that they had used Google Docs/Google Drive or a simple Course management System, others commented that their teachers still needed them to PRINT OUT their assignments and turn them in!

As I near the end of my teaching career, I wonder what is down the road for Education at all levels. Students need the ability to focus on a piece of text in order to read, analyze and write about it; they need to concentrate in order to solve mathematical problems, do their science labs and write up the results, and listen to short lectures and then engage in discussion. Attending to every audible alert or vibration of their smartphones is destroying that focus, and eroding their ability to go more than a few minutes without checking their phones for a new text, tweet, photo, or status update. As noted earlier, the mere mention of grading an assignment sends them to their phones to check grades; furthermore, there is an impatience on the part of students to have work graded, and I sometimes have to say, “Look—this isn’t the drive through window at McDonalds! It takes time.”

I have already blogged about not buying smartphones for 10 year olds, but thinking about all of those parents out there who will be doing holiday shopping at the Cell Phone store makes me want to remind them that children need structure as a child. Cell Phone companies need to be sure to stock plenty of boring, old fashioned phones for children and young tweens: there is plenty of time to get an iPhone, but increasingly, I worry that the window for teaching children and teens how to think, reflect, plan, and read is shrinking. Give us a fighting chance to teach your child without the allure of a smartphone in his or her backpack. We are going to need some smart people who can focus on the real world issues of poverty, terrorism, and global warming, to name a few: let’s hope they can do so without needing to stop a dozen times an hour to check social media or text on their iPhone or Galaxy.

Last updated November 14, 2015