iPads and YouTube: Are digital tools in classrooms a student asset or distraction?

Tablets and cell phones in the classroom could be changing students' attention spans, but long-term studies have yet to prove the two are linked.

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What hasn’t changed as much as us and our technology is school. So here’s a thought: How about adjusting teaching and school to our changing students, culture, workplace, and society instead of somehow dialing students back to the way our generation learned (in school)?

Anne Collier

Guest Blogger

Anne Collier is editor of NetFamilyNews.org and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a Web-based interactive forum and information site for teens, parents, educators, and everybody interested in the impact of the social Web on youth and vice versa. She lives in Northern California and has two sons.

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Do we really want to make our children conform to the way students used to be – to the way we used to be? I imagine a lot of adults do want that. But we adults were information consumers and memorizers. They are information hunter-gatherers (as media professor Henry Jenkins put it years ago) who don’t need to memorize anything (it’s all at their fingertips 24/7).

What they need more than anything is to learn how to filter that information, to glean what’s of value. Thankfully, the Pew study indicates teachers really get that part: “Overall, the vast majority of these teachers say a top priority in today’s classrooms should be teaching students how to ‘judge the quality of online information’,” but I hope not just online information!

What students will tell you is that a lot of the information presented at school doesn’t interest them.

Students may have been saying this for generations, but what’s different now is that they are awash in information that is of great interest to them outside of school, and it’s instantly accessible (except at school, if they haven’t gotten around the filtering with their cellphones).

We didn’t have that choice. We could dream about what we’d do in our futures, but today’s students can write code, publish an e-book, produce videos, develop a following, get professional coaching, teach guitar on YouTube, take a Web-based MIT class, collaborate on projects, join fellow activists, etc. – whenever they want. That has to make it even harder for them than it was for us to sit through Algebra 2.

Possible conflict of interest? Many teachers – particularly those focused on long-standing measures of academic performance (e.g., AP teachers) – are invested in the education status quo.

So I wonder about the value of polling people about something that threatens the status quo. To her credit, referring to the teachers surveyed, the Pew report’s lead author, Kristen Purcell, said “the label of distraction is a judgment of this generation,” Richtel reported, and “acknowledged that the findings could be viewed from another perspective: that the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn,” which was brought up by some teachers in focus groups.

And media use is just “entertainment”?! I find this really disturbing and disrespectful of students. One teacher asks in the Times piece, “What’s going to happen when they don’t have constant entertainment?” That’s a question a lot of adults have, I know, but it’s based on the mistaken assumption that what media was to us when we were young is what today’s media is to our children. That’s simply not the case.

And yet a whole study – a second survey of educators the Times covers, by Common Sense Media, uses the term “entertainment media” throughout, and respondents were asked questions using that term rather than the more neutral term “media” or “digital media,” prejudicing responses.