It’s six in the morning, and Debbie Cook is gently shaken awake by a girl. With unruly blonde locks and an angelic face, Debbie’s daughter gives her a beaming smile. “Hi Mummy,” she says, her voice soft from sleep. Debbie smiles back, still waking up. The four-year-old pulls a black rectangle up from the floor, and pushes it towards Debbie. “Can you unlock the iPad for me?”
With the overwhelming increase in generalised screen presence in children’s lives, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme views have arisen surrounding the debate about the benefits and downfalls of increased digital input in schools and home lives. Many parents are expressing concerns about the priority of screen-time over physical exercise that their children are presenting.
Similarly, teachers have experienced the move to screen-using classrooms over the past decades, and are now juggling the benefits and drawbacks of using devices in the modern learning environment. According to The Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network, children should only have access to a maximum of two hours of daily screen time, however, with more devices becoming available to children, especially through online schooling during the Victorian lockdowns and for entertainment reasons, this limit is more than likely being breached on a regular basis. With this, groups like The Everyday Digital Project have been conducting studies surrounding the way children use digital media both within and outside of the school environment, presenting results that show about 18% of students in some schools tend to use screens for four or more hours at home, while the rest were on devices for one to two hours each day.
So what does this mean for school-aged children? Mother of two Debbie Cook recognises that devices do have benefits, but she worries that physical exercise, creativity and imagination might be at risk, due to the seven devices accessible in her house.
“It actually does teach them some aspects of life. The games that [my kids] play increase their teamwork. They’re actually connected with their neighbours. That’s only happened [recently], and it’s increased their relationship, because they’ve lost all that during COVID, but they are just constantly ringing each other on Messenger Kids, and they’ll be talking to each other while they’re playing Minecraft together,” she says. “I’m concerned about their reduced imagination and creativity, and [their] ability to actually entertain themselves and to be independent. I’ve also noticed, with the increase of at-home schooling, with the school computer at home, [my son’s] not even touching the Wii. He used to play that all the time, and he used to be moving around a lot more and playing that, but now he’s just sitting on a couch playing Minecraft.”
Like many parents, Cook finds that her children’s need for immediate stimulus is quite alarming, saying, “[They have] that increased anxiety and hyperactivity due to the stimulus of the computers. There’s just that addiction”.
Melbourne Child Psychology outlined a similar issue in their blog post ‘Does Your Child have a Technology Addiction?’, showing that many parents experience the same struggles as Cook, and that screen addiction is a very real problem that needs to be tackled in today’s society.
Cook also expresses concerns about digital security, as her son’s online schooling has led to some events that have made her lose trust in the school device’s ability to filter content that the students are exposed to.
“I used his school computer when he’d have Zoom sessions with [teachers], and his computer started showing all these inappropriate pictures from a ‘dream singles’ site. I don’t know how it happened. And lack of the knowledge of a parent can impact what the children can be [subjected] to, and being exposed to all these things are giving them insight into parts of the world that previous generations had, and nor do they need.”
High school teacher Allison Banks* recommends that devices be used in moderation.
“Ideally, in a perfect world, it’s just a tool that gets used when the technology is an advantage, so, for example, it may not be possible for the students to do a particular science experiment in real life, since it’s not practically possible with, for example, the lifting of huge weights, and to be able to do that using a digital model allows them to explore that concept in a way that they wouldn’t be able to explore physically. So, there’s opportunities in that respect. If you’re going to be able to be a critical thinker and to look at texts using digital literacy, then you need to know how they’re constructed and you need to have done that yourself.”
Banks' Year 7 students all possess their own laptop, and she admits that this abundance of screens can be troublesome, saying, “We do have students who can’t manage their usage of games, to the point where they privilege their gaming use above all learning, and unless they’re constantly monitored, they’ll be on whatever game it is that’s captured their [interest],” she says. “My observation has been that it seems that young people are able to focus their attention for much smaller spans of time. They have difficulty sustaining attention without very stimulating input, for want of a better term. It takes more to get them interested and excited about something, because they’re used to their senses being overloaded constantly. It makes my teaching challenging, because suddenly everything has to be new and the next best thing and exciting and different. And when everything is new, exciting and different, it ceases to be stimulating.”
Conversely, Banks also finds that, despite these issues, screen presence in classrooms has provided many benefits in her students’ learning.
“The majority of what I teach is prepared with a laptop and if I’m going to show some information on the screen, I’d rather have that prepared [beforehand], and be able to focus my attention on the students and the content rather than writing things as I go. So I’m definitely going to keep using [technology] for that purpose. Being able to learn in different modes is really important. Some people learn better by watching a video rather than reading about something, and being able to use those multiple ways of exploring the things we’re learning is really [great]. So I don’t think it’s going anywhere, I think it’s just important that it’s being used judiciously, and with thought and care.”
While Debbie Cook thinks that school children using technology would benefit them in the long run, resulting in a generation of “tech-savvy” adults, Banks thinks otherwise, stating, “I think [school children] are less aware of how technology works. They know how to use it, but using something and understanding how it works and being able to solve problems with it are not the same thing. That skill to understand what is happening with your device and how it’s happening, people really need to be taught that. It’s not just going to be learnt by osmosis, through using a piece of technology, and that is the mistake that a lot of people make. They think just because kids are using technology, then they understand all about it. They don’t, they need to be taught”.
With this statement, Banks states that Internet Technology classes need to be more common in classes in order for schools to keep up with the progression of screen presence in children’s lives, to ensure that students have a skilled understanding of the technology that they’re using.
Despite initial thoughts that tend to see screens as a negative tool, education experts may say otherwise. Professor Catherine Beavis has spent more than thirty years in the education field, and conducts research surrounding literacy and the digital age. Like Banks, Beavis outlines common issues that arise with the normality of screen presence in classrooms now.
“The difficulty with [digital-using classes], when it’s not used particularly well, is when there are things like the activities that kids are asked to do tend to be fairly mindless, rather than asking them to explore, reflect and use critical thinking. And sometimes some of the educational material that presents as educational sources is very simplistic and goes for right or wrong answers, either/or answers, promotes the kind of ‘tick the box’ mentality.”
Beavis explains that good digital resources ask students to “explore and be curious”, and the best kind of usage is, “where the teacher is engaged with the student, and the student is actually doing something with the technology, so that there’s creation and creativity, or where they’re looking for analysis or gaining deep contextual insights and understanding, not just watching it”.
“There’s wonderful resources there, and you need to be aware of them, and use them wisely,” Beavis says, pointing out that, similar to Banks' statements, screen-use in the classroom can be excellent at broadening students’ learning experience, so long as they are used properly.
While arguments for and against digital technology in the classroom will continue to arise, Banks states that screens “are not going anywhere”, so teachers and parents alike need to develop strategies for responsible screen use to utilise the benefits that come with digital presence.
If you would like to read more about technology addiction, you can visit Melbourne Child Psychology's blog post here:
You can also visit The Everyday Digital Project’s website for more information about school children’s screen use, and what this means for teachers and parents, here:
* Allison Banks is a pseudonym for this interviewee.
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