Teachers vs Technology: Why has Ed Tech Failed to Improve K-12 Education?

Laptops, tablets, and SMART boards were all hailed in the early 2000s as the harbingers of a new era of technology-driven educational transformation. It was just the latest in successive waves of technological innovation forecast to improve K-12 education. Billions of education dollars were invested in education technology in recent decades and yet a 2015 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report has demonstrated that such investments have led to “no appreciable improvements” in educational achievement.

As a new high school English teacher in London, UK, back in 2007-08, Daisy Christodoulou was typical of most educators at the time. She was wowed by whiteboard technology and committed to taking advantage of the latest ed tech gadget to facilitate interactive student learning.  Once in the classroom, in spite of her best intentions, Daisy turned it into a regular classroom projector and rarely used the more sophisticated features. She was not alone because that’s exactly what  most of us did in those years,

Optimistic forecasts of the transformative power of classroom computes and Internet access never materialized.  Spending on IT in U.K. schools quadrupled during the SMART Board phase, but it was a bust and dismissed in 2018 as another example of “imposing unwanted technology on schools.” A $1.3-billion 2013 Los Angeles Unified School Board deal with Apple and Pearson Learning to supply iPads was jettisoned a year later because of security vulnerabilities, incomplete curricula, and inadequate teacher training. Many onlookers wondered, if the giants can’t make it work, can anyone?

The promised ed-tech revolution that never seems to arrive is the central focus of Daisy Christodoulou‘s latest book, Teachers vs. Tech?, released just as the COVID-19 school shutdown thrust millions of teachers into the largely uncharted territory of e-learning on the fly.  It also raises the vitally important, but discomforting question: Why has education technology failed in the past, and is it destined to fail in the future? We may well find out with the biggest global experiment in ed-tech e-learning now underway.

Christodoulou’s Teachers vs. Tech? tackles what has become the central issue in the unsettling and crisis-ridden  COVID-19 education era.  It’s an instantly engaging, highly original, and soundly researched guide to identifying the obstacles to harnessing ed-tech in schools, a deadly-accurate assessment of why teachers retain a healthy skepticism about the marvels of ed tech, and a constructive prescription for re-purposing those 21st century machines.

What’s absolutely refreshing about Teachers vs Tech? is the author’s consistent commitment to reasonably objective, evidence-based analysis in a field dominated by tech evangelists and tech fear mongers. Common claims that teachers are conservative and change-averse, by nature, or that education is a “human” enterprise immune to technology do not completely explain the resistance to ed tech interventions. New technologies come with embedded educational pedagogy, she contends, that embraces pseudoscience theory and cuts against the grain of most classroom teachers.

Christodoulou effectively challenges ed tech innovations free riding on unfounded educational theories. Over the past 70 years or so, she correctly reports, cognitive science and psychology have discovered much about how the human mind works and learning happens.  Many of these discoveries came out of scientific investigations associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and information technology. What’s peculiar about this is , in Christodoulou’s words, “the gap between what we know about human cognition and what often gets recommended in education technology.”

Education technology is rife with fancy gadgets and fads, most of which are promoted by ed tech evangelists,  school change theorists, or learning corporations. The author finds it very odd that “the faddiest part of education” is the aspect supposedly rooted in scientific research. “Far from establishing sound research-based principles,” she writes, “technology has been used to introduce yet more pseudoscience into the education profession.”  There’s still hope, in her view, that the evidence- based research underpinning learning will eventually find its way into the new technologies.

She does not shy away from tackling the most significant and disputed issues in the integration of education technology into teaching and learning. What are the biggest lessons from the science of learning?  Can technology be effectively used to personalize learning? What’s wrong with saying ‘Just Google It’?  How can technology be used to create active learning? Do mobile smart devices have any place in the classroom? Can technology be employed to build upon the expertise of teachers? How can technology improve student assessment for teachers? All of these questions are answered with remarkably clear, well-supported answers.

The book makes a strong and persuasive case for incorporating the science of learning into technology-assisted classroom teaching.  Drawing upon her first book, Seven Myths about Education (2013), Christodoulou explains how cognitive science has shed new light of the efficacy of explicit instruction for improving student learning.  Direct instruction is judged to be more effective in developing long-term memory to overcome the limitations of short-term memory. Her plea is for ed tech and its associated software to tap more into that form of pedagogy.

Teachers will be drawn to her thought-provoking chapter on the use and misuse of smart devices in today’s classrooms. Jumping right into the public debate, Christodoulou demonstrates how today’s mobile phones interfere with learning because they are “designed to be distracting” and absorb too much time inside and outside of school. Citing a 2017 meta-review of the research produced by Paul A. Kirschner and Pedro De Bruyckere, she points out the “negative relationship” between academic achievement and social network activity among young people. Popular claims that adolescents are better at “multi-taking” are judged to be completely unfounded. She favours, on balance, either strictly limiting smart devices or convincing the tech giants to produce devices better suited to teaching and learning environments.

Christodoulou identifies, with remarkable precision, what technology can bring to teaching and student assessment.  Teachers, she shows, have real expertise in what works with students, but they also have blind spots. While there is no substitute for human interaction, ed tech can help teachers to develop more consistency in their delivery and to tap into students’ long term memory,

One of the authors greatest strengths is her uncanny ability to discover, hone-in on, and apply technological solutions that make teaching more meaningful, fulfilling and less onerous when it comes to workload and paperwork. Spaced repetition algorithms, are highlighted as a specific example of how technology can aid teachers in helping students to retain knowledge.  As Education Director of No More Marking, she makes a compelling case for utilizing online comparative judgement technology to improve the process and reliability of student grading.

Christodoulou’s Teachers vs Tech? provides a master class on how to clear away the obstacles to improving K-12 education through the effective and teacher-guided use of technology. Popular and mostly fanciful ed tech myths are shredded, one at a time, and summarized succinctly in this marvelous concluding passage:

“Personalization is too often interpreted as being about learning styles and student choice. The existence of powerful search engines is assumed to render long-term memory  irrelevant. Active learning is about faddish and trivial projects. Connected devices are seen as a panacea for all of education’s ills, when they may just make it easier for students to get distracted.”

Implementing ed tech that flies in the face of, or discounts, teacher expertise lies at the heart of the problem. “Successful disruptive innovation solves a problem better than the existing solution,” Christodoulou claims. “Too many education technology innovations just create new problems.” ‘Looking it up on Google,’ she points out, is actually just “a manifestation of discovery learning, an idea which has a long history of failure.”

Technology skeptics expecting another critique of the dominance of the technology giants will be disappointed. The title, Teachers vs. Tech?, ends with a well-placed question mark.  While most of the current ed tech innovations perpetuate an “online life” that is “not on the side of the evidence,” Daisy Christodoulou shows conclusively that we (educators) have only ourselves to blame. “If they’re promoting bad ideas,” she notes, ” it’s at least partly because we’ve made it easy for them to do so.”

What’s the source of the underlying tension between teachers and education technology?  What has contributed to teachers’ skepticism about the marvels of ed-tech innovation?  How was the teachers vs tech tension played out during the COVID-19 school shutdown?  If the latest ed-tech toys and software were programmed with educationally sound, evidence-based pedagogy, would the response of educators be any different?  

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Banning Cellphones in Class: Why is the Policy Making a Comeback?

One of the Doug Ford Ontario education reform proposals that’s attracted relatively little attention is the June 2018 election pledge to ban cellphones in class. In the immediate aftermath of Ford’s election, education observers would be wise to take a serious look at the sweeping promise to “ban cell phones in all primary and secondary school classrooms, in order to maximize learning time.” While it is tempting to dismiss it as just another example of “back-to-basics” thinking, that would be most unwise. That is because it is inspired by openly expressed teacher concerns and policies now being implemented and debated in France, the United Kingdom, and a number of North American school districts.

French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer is the latest to take action in the form of a National Assembly bill to ban cellphones at school before school resumes in September 2018. Deeply concerned about the phenomenon of “phone-addicted children,” he claims that the bill is a “detox measure” to combat classroom distractions and cyberbullying. More than 90 per cent of French children aged 12 years or older posess a mobile phone and teachers are finding it increasingly difficult to capture and hold the attention of their students.

“Mobile phones are a technological advance but they cannot monopolize our lives, ” Blanquer told LCI TV News. “You can’t find your way in a world of technology if you can’t read, write, count, respect others and work in a team.” Supporters of the French legislation say smartphone usage among children of junior and middle-school age has also aggravated cyberbullying, made it easier to access pornography, and interfered with social interactions in schools. Teachers, caught up in the proposed blanket ban, succeeded in being exempted from the cellphone prohibition.

Since the French cellphone ban was first proposed in December of 2017, school authorities in Britain and Ireland have been debating taking similar measures. The founder of London-based researchED, Tom Bennett, claimed, back in September 2015, that children should not be allowed smartphones until they were 16-years-of-age.  Teachers, he advised, should not allow them unless absolutely necessary, given the many challenges of managing modern classrooms.

The new Chief Inspector of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, reports that “pupil behaviour” is “the number one concern of parents” and that steps must be taken to reduce the “low-level disruption,” including the inappropriate use of mobile devices in class. ” I am yet to be convinced of the educational benefits of all day access to ‘Snapchat” and the like, and the place of mobile phones in the classroom seems to me dubious at best.”

One of the most influential studies, “Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction and Student Performance,“ produced in May 2015 by London School of Economics researchers Louis-Phillipe Beland and Richard Murphy, is usually cited by those favouring restrictions or bans on classroom cellphone use. Based upon a study of moblile phone use in high schools in four English cities (Birmingham, London, Leicester and Manchester) in the Spring of 2013, the researchers found that banning mobile phones produced an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation, and rising to 14.23% among low-achieving students. The net effect of banning mobile phones, according to the researchers, added up to the equivalent of an extra week of school each academic year.

The critical question of whether mobile phones are a necessity or a distraction had resurfaced here in Canada long before an outright ban ended up as a key plank in the Ford Nation education agenda. One very active and informed Ontario elementary school teacher, Andrew Campbell, presented a very thorough review of Ontario cellphone policy and practice on April 14, 2018, at researchED Ontario.  Since the arrival of the Apple iPhone in January 2007, mobile phones have proliferated among children and teens, necessitating changes in school policies. Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board, reacted by introducing a system wide ban in April 2007, only to reverse it four years later.

Much  of the mobile phone proliferation was sparked by the adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, formally recognizing their acceptance as tools for learning. While BYOD proved to be bad policy, school systems were simply unable to curtain the technological tide or properly regulate the use of such devices.  In 2013, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) passed a resolution proposing that cellphones be “turned-off and stored during school hours,” unless authorized for use by a teacher. By 2014, some 60 per cent of Ontario schools had adopted BYOD policies and allowed students to use their own devices, in most cases, for cost-efficiency reasons. One Quebec English school board, in the Eastern Townships, went even further, distributing tablets to all students in Grade 5 and up while maintaining a rather open and permissive smartphone policy.

Mobile phone policies have tended to be reactions to technological innovations. Thierry Karsenti, Canada Research Chair on Technologies in Education and professor at the University of Montreal, told Maclean’s Magazine students will find a way to bring phones into the classroom regardless of the rules. A survey of more than 4,000 high school students showed that while 79.3 per cent of respondents owned a cellphone, they did not figure prominently in day-to-day teaching and learning. Cellphones were widely used in and around schools, even though some 88.4 per cent of student respondents claimed that the devices were banned either in class or at school altogether.

Defenders of cellphone use in class tend to cite research based more upon student attitudes than on the perceptions of their teachers. One online survey conducted for Verizon with 1,000 students in grades 6-8 claimed to show its positive effect on student learning.  Students who used smartphones in the classroom were more likely to ‘feel smart,’ be happier, and show interested in pursuing STEM subjects. More affluent students were more likely to be allowed to use smartphones in the classroom.   “Our research supports the fact that mobile technology can inspire and engage students today. We need to meet children where they are and leverage their use of mobile devices to increase their interest in STEM” claimed Rose Stuckey Kirk, President of Verizon

Another September 2014 Stanford University study focussed on “at risk’ students and purported to demonstrate how technology aids in learning when there is at least one device per student and the devices are readily available for multiple uses by the student throughout the school day. A 2017 study conducted by Dr. James Derounian at the University of Gloucestershire found that 45% of students in a small-scale 100 student group believed that the use of phones in classrooms aided in their education, making it easier to access online text resources.

Clearly defined class expectations and procedures are essential if teachers are to see benefits from cellphone use in class. Strict rules, established at the outset, work best and, without them, student attention is hard to establish and maintain. Many of the most effective teachers now use some form of check-in and check-out system for devices. The “Stoplight System, ” developed by two Halton DSB teachers, Troy Tennant and Cindy Cosentino, shows potential and is being mimicked elsewhere in Ontario.

Maintaining good student behaviour is becoming more of a priority and that explains the renewed popularity of restricting mobile phone use by students in schools and classrooms. Tom Bennett’s School Report blog post, June 23, 2018, again identified mobile phones as a major contributor to the discipline challeges teachers face in today’s classrooms. “Low level disruption sounds cute,” he wrote, “but it’s kryptonite for any lesson. It normalises rudeness, laziness, and grinds teachers down over weeks and months. It is no small issue. It is the most common reason for classroom behaviour to disintegrate.”  The Guardian concurs with the stance taken by Bennett and Ofsted boss Spielman.  A recent  editorial argued that schools would be better places for learning without the constant and distracting presence of the devices.

Should schools continue to welcome mobile phones in class? Why has France taken the lead in banning mobile phones at school? Who is promoting and supporting the continued and expanded use of cellphones in the classroom?  Is it possible to enforce a ban on the use of such devices in schools? Where is the evidence-based research supporting the widespread use of mobile phones in class? 

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Pokemon Go and Education: Will Schools Be Receptive or Resistant?

A Pokemon Go craze has swept across North America during the summer of 2016.  Go to any historic monument, urban park or major public building and you will spot some strange scenes. Teens and adults gazing into their smartphones and wandering around in public spaces.  Cars parked in odd places and people combing the roadsides. Pairs of young adults rushing along sidewalks and hopping fences. While the gatherings look like an outdoor convention of nerds, they are actually “Pokemon happenings” and the first real sign of Augmented Reality (AR) reaching the masses.

The unexpected summer surge of Pokemon Go has educators and parents buzzing about its educational potential.  One day after the game was released, on July 7, 2016, IDEAFM issued its forecast: “14 Reasons Why Pokemon GO is the Future of Learning.”  America’s best known teacher-blogger Larry Ferlazzo, generated a head spinning July 13 collection of blog posts and tweets covering every possible educational application of the game. The education technology website, Edudemic, further fueled the craze with a July 22, 2016 news story proclaiming “Pokemon Go is the Future.”

Social media savvy teachers were quick to jump on the opportunity to capitalize on students’ love for the game by dreaming-up ways of incorporating it into social studies, mathematics, mapping, and literacy. More seasoned educational analysts such as Audrey Watters of Hack Education  either reserved judgement or cast a critical eye on the craze.  Over at EduGeek Journal, a true skeptic offered this withering assessment. “Every single tech trend turns into a gimmick to sell education mumbo jumbo kitsch tied to every cool, hip trend that pops up on the social media radar.”

Technological innovations do tend to get over-hyped in North American K-12 education.  Educational TV was supposed to revolutionize teaching and learning, MySpace was hailed as the University of the Future, and DVDs proposed to “save public schools.”  More recently, educators wonder whatever happened to Second Life and Google Wave — and tend to take a wait-and-see attitude now that Block-chain has become educational.

Pokemon Go may beat the odds and be the harbinger of AR applications in K-12 classrooms. Developed by California software company Niantic, it is an alluring location-based augmented reality mobile game that does break new ground it terms of user experience. Using a smartphone’s GPS and camera, players seek to “catch” Pokemon outside in the real world around them.  They interact with Pokemon, which has been geospatially overlaid onto the real world.  Going about their daily lives, players use their phones to track, locate and capture Pokemon, which can be trained and sent into battle.

The original Pokemon rose to iconic pop culture status in the  late 1990s as a trading card game, as a TV show, and then as a GameBoy-supported video game. Stitching together the real world and the virtual game has made the latest iteration of the Pokemon franchise a smash hit with users of all ages. Within two weeks of its release, the social gaming invention shot past Twitter to record an average user peak of 21 million.

Breathless educators tout Pokemon Go as a “revolutionizing” educational force. Searching the neighbourhood to find Pokemon gets so-called “nerdy kids” out of the house and active, promoting physical fitness through fun activity.  It does teach kids and adults more about their local history and enhances map-reading skills.  Unmotivated students tend to love gaming, so it can be a “hook” for harder to reach teens. Much of its mass appeal comes from the game’s emphasis on ‘collecting’ ghost-like Pokemon figures, then giving birth to new ones, and entering into competitions.

A few aspects of the Pokemon Go craze have caused disquiet among teachers as well as parents. The safety concerns have been flagged, especially after a few well-publicized accidents involving Pokemon searchers.  Young players transfixed by the game can wander into busy traffic, venture into dangerous surroundings, and trespass on private property in search of Pokemon. Personal digital privacy concerns have been raised about data collected by the Pokemon app, particularly for those under age 13.   The cost of Smartphones with sufficient capacity for Pokemon Go and its AR function will also present a problem for cash-strapped school districts.

Pokemon Go is, for the most part, an AR game geared more to urban users than to rural dwellers. Since its a spin-off from an earlier AR game known as Ingress, the geo-location data base is keyed to mostly urban monuments, prominent buildings and historic sites. In Pokemon Go, that’s why the user-created portals termed Pokestops and Gyms also tend to be in urban locales. Students in rural schools would be at a real disadvantage given the limited choices provided by the commercial game.

Early adopters tend to latch onto the latest innovation and then find a classroom application.  One Assistant Principal in a Waco, Texas elementary school, Jessica Torres, saw Pokemon Go as a possible game changer for kids.   “Pokemon Go is interdisciplinary in a way that’s hard to obtain with other programs,” she told Education Week. “I’m tired of seeing science in one area, reading in another area, math somewhere else.”  Having said that, Torres admitted that “a lot of kinks have to be ironed out” before it could be integrated into the teaching-learning day. “Our kids are going to want to talk about it when they get back to school, “she added, so teachers will have to be familiar with the game because its “an easy way to build a relationship” with students.

The so-called “hype-cycle” of Ed-Tech tends to create stampedes and short-lived fads, almost burying the real conversations about how best to challenge, motivate and engage our students. What does Pokemon Go offer that other teaching strategies and resources do not?  If Pokemon Go becomes a core component of the program, what other engaging activities and projects will fall by the wayside?  If the game proves to be a passing fad, what are the consequences for teachers and students? 

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Online and Blended Learning: What’s Driving the Growth in Canadian K-12 Schools?

Digital learning is on the rise in Canadian K-12 schools and is now emerging as a critical education policy issue in most of the nation’s ten provinces and three territories. Annual reports on K-12 Online Learning from 2008 to 2015, mostly researched and written by Canadian information technology expert Michael K. Barbour, demonstrate steady and incremental growth in the implementation and practice of distance, online and blended learning.

Without a national education authority and public education governed by the provinces and territories, accurately assessing that growth in a country with 5.3 million K-12 students and 15,000 schools remains challenging for researchers. Based upon increasingly reliable annual surveys, the numbers of tracked “distance education students” have risen from some 140,000 (0.5%) in 2008-09 to 332,077 (6.2%) in 2013-14 (Barbour and LaBonte 2014).

The use of blended learning is also spreading, even if the reported data is rather patchy. With the 2012 formation of the CAN eLearning Network, a national pan-Canadian consortium focused on K-12 online and blended learning, better data may be generated, making tracking much more accurate and reliable for policy analysis and decision-making (Barbour 2013, CAN eLearning Network 2015 ).

Compared with the recent explosion of digital learning schools in the United States, online and blended learning in Canada’s K-12 public schools has followed a decidedly different pattern of evolution (Finn and Fairchild 2012; Barbour 2012). Much of the online learning in parts of Canada remains an outgrowth of correspondence school education, involving e-format programmed units, audio distance learning and video conferencing. The radical variations, free market experimentation, and ‘disruptive’ innovation found in the United States (Chubb 2012; Christensen et al. 2013) have not been replicated in Canadian public education.

The primary drivers in Canadian provincial and territorial systems are government authorities, while learning corporations serve as contractors providing content, learning technologies, and support services to the government-run operations. In spite of the tremendous potential for expansion in online learning programs, the free market remains regulated and private providers are largely absent. Provincial or school district authorities promote a ‘growth-management ‘strategy where online and blended learning are considered the next evolution of effective technology integration (Barbour PTDEA 2015).

Significant gaps still exist in service levels and barriers stand in the way of expansion into un-serviced frontiers, particularly in the Far North and First Nations communities. Only British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta have, so far, proven to be fertile ground for private school ventures in the form of virtual or online schools.(Barbour 2010, 41; Kuehn, 2013).

Virtually all Canadian educational systems remain designed around seat time, defined as providing in-school classes of regulated size with a minimum number of instructional hours (Jenson et al. 2010; Powell et al. 2015). Some private sector virtual schools have recently arrived and thrive outside the mainstream system.

No full-time online public charter schools exist, even in Alberta, the only province in Canada with Charter School legislation (Bennett 2012). The rise of virtual schooling delivered by ‘cyber charter schools’ has surfaced as a public policy issue in Alberta, where a University of Alberta research unit, Parkland Institute, released an October 2013 report warning of the dangers of “pedagogical innovation” in the form of privatization presented as a way of easing “budgetary constraints” (Cummins and Gibson 2013).

The growth of online learning in Canada may be more significant than reported by provincial and territorial authorities. While Quebec and New Brunswick both reported modest distance education enrolments in 2013-14, estimates for teachers using the curriculum in blended format are much higher. From 2011 to 2014, to cite another example, the Ontario Ministry of Education coordinated an initiative to expand access to blended learning for all K-13 students, which generated almost 240,000 blended learning enrolments in the provincial learning management system during the 2013-14 school year (Barbour and LaBonte 2014).

The national advocacy group 21C Canada holds some sway over provincial ministers of education (C21 Canada 2015), but, so far, the implementation of 21st century learning and the explicit teaching of ‘digital literacies’ is very uneven, particularly outside of the recognized lead provinces, Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta (People for Education 2014).

The natural evolution of online and face-to-face education from 2008 until 2015 is exemplified by the spread of blended learning.  Newer blended learning models, promoted by the Christensen Institute (Powell et al. 2015), are beginning to emerge in the so-called “hybrid zone” in what might be termed ‘lighthouse’ schools.

While provinces such as BC, Alberta and Ontario actively promote eLearning, innovation is limited by the current structural boundaries and education authorities are only beginning to track blended learning enrolment. In 2012-13, British Columbia enacted legislation enabling “flexible learning choices” and, with the support of the BC Distributed Learning Administrators’ Association (BCDLAA), blended learning and “flipped classroom” practices are becoming more mainstream (Barbour 2013, 61-62).

National online education survey reports, produced by the CAN eLearning Network (Barbour and LaBonte BIT 2015), testify to the steady growth of distance education and online programs, but identify the need for “better data” and more evidence of the transition to blended ‘competency-based learning’ in Canada. Evolution rather than revolution appears to be the Canadian way.

What’s really driving the growth in Canadian K-12 online and blended learning?  Where is the initiative coming from – from the top-down or the schools-up? What advantages does the “managed-growth” approach over the “destructive innovation” doctrine prevalent in some American states? Would Canadian students and families benefit from more “flexible learning” choices in K-12 public education?

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Web Junkies and Schools: Should Screen Addiction Be a Public Policy Issue?

An alarming new documentary, Web Junkie, recently aired on  the PBS television network, and alerted North Americans to radical measures being taken to curb screen addiction among children and youth in China. It is a powerful little film exposing the alarming effects on teenagers who become hooked on video games, playing dozens of hours at a time without taking breaks to eat, sleep or even go to the bathroom. Doctors in China have responded by designating “screen addiction” as a clinical disorder and established boot camp-style rehabilitation centres to treat its victims.

Internet addiction among teens may not be a diagnosed clinical disorder here, but it is now quite prevalent nearly everywhere you look—in homes, public spaces, and schools. Most North American physicians and psychologists are concerned about the screen fixation when youths are plugged in and tuned out of “live” interaction for so many hours a day that it imperils their normal, healthy development. More shockingly, it starts in early childhood with toddlers being handed cellphones or tablets to entertain themselves. By the time kids enter school, they are already hooked on the latest devices.

The PBS documentary spurred Jane Brody, Personal Health columnist for The New York Times, to take a closer look at this subterranean issue. She unearthed a 2013 policy statement on “Children, Adolescents, and the Media” approved by the the American Academy of Pediatrics. In it, the American pediatricians cited these shocking statistics from a Kaiser Family Foundation study in 2010: “The average 8- to 10-year-old spends nearly eight hours a day with a variety of different media, and older children and teenagers spend more than 11 hours per day.” Television, long a popular “babysitter,” remains the dominant medium, but the study showed that computers, tablets and cellphones were gradually taking over.

Limiting and controlling children’s screen time was identified as a new and unfamiliar responsibility for today’s parents.  “Many parents seem to have few rules about use of media by their children and adolescents,” the academy stated, and two-thirds of those questioned in the Kaiser study said their parents had no rules about how much time the youngsters spent with media. Busy and stressed out parents, it appears, see the devices as handy ‘electronic passifiers’ to calm perpetually active kids and to free up young adults themselves for screen activities, including ongoing social media interactions.

Recognized experts like Catherine Steiner-Adair, a Harvard affiliated psychologist and author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, are full of advice for parents, but less so when it comes to schools. Before age 2, children should not be exposed to any electronic media, the pediatrics academy maintains, because “a child’s brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.” Older children and teenagers, according to the experts, should spend no more than one or two hours a day with entertainment media, preferably with high-quality content, and spend more free time playing outdoors, reading, doing hobbies and “using their imaginations in free play.”

Heavy use of electronic media can have significant negative effects on children’s behavior, health and school performance. Recent studies have linked “simulated violence” in video games to tendencies to act violently or to become desensitized to violence around them. Habitual users may become more adept at multitasking, but, over time, lose the capacity to focus or concentrate on what is important, affecting their problem-solving abilities.

Texting is the real electronic epidemic confronting most middle schools and high schools. About one-half of American teens send and receive 60 or more text messages a day  — before, in between, during and after school classes. Teenagers from 12 to 17, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center study averaged 3,364 texts a month. An earlier JFK Medical Center study found that teens sent an average of 34 text messages a night after they went to bed, contributing to the problem of sleep deprivation. One University of Rhode Island researcher, Kristina Hatch, sees a direct connection between heavy use of electronic media and social withdrawal and isolation, leaving kids “lonely and depressed.”

This is not just an American social phenomenon. A 2014 report conducted by WeAreSocial revealed that every day Canadians spend 4.9 hours online on laptop or desktop computers and, in addition, 1.9 hours on mobile devices. Just over two hours a day are now spent on social media, with some 91 % on Facebook and 46% on Twitter. It would be much higher for children and teens being raised in an electronic media saturated culture.

Canadian psychologists and psychiatrists are beginning to take action to address the incidence of Internet addiction. The Canada Life Chair of Teen Mental Health at Dalhousie University, Dr. Stanley Kutcher, is keenly aware of the problem and attempting to promote preventative programs. In a few cities, such as Windsor, Ontario hospitals are responding by establishing services to offer clinical treatment to children, teens and adults struggling with video game and Internet dependency.

How widespread is the problem of Internet and screen addiction among today’s children and teens?  What can parents do to limit and control children’s screen time? Where do the responsibilities of parents end and the interests of schools begin?  Is there a place for Internet addiction education the emerging mental health curriculum? Should we be looking at a public education program involving students, parents and schools?

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