How is screen time really affecting student learning? Join fellow CEA members for a three-part book club this fall exploring The Digital Delusion, by Jared Cooney Horvath. Together we will dig into the research, share our experiences as educators, and consider what the prevalence of educational technology means for teaching and learning in today’s classrooms.
The book club kicks off at CEA headquarters in Hartford on October 8, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. Meet your fellow book club members, enjoy dinner, and get the conversation going by sharing your own perspectives and experiences with screens and student learning. The first 20 CEA members who register get a free book!
On November 5 and December 3, 4:30 – 5:45 p.m., virtual sessions will feature a facilitated discussion of an assigned portion of the book.
Cooney Horvath participated in a webinar hosted by Connecticut legislators last month in which he shared some sobering statistics about students and screens. He said that studies show that students use technology for learning 450 hours per year, while they use it for the passive consumption of rapidly switching media content for 2,500 hours per year. On average, students will spend six minutes studying on an electronic device before they switch to using it for entertainment purposes, and when using a computer in a room with a teacher, students will be off task for 38 minutes out of every hour.
“In the battle between entertainment vs. education, entertainment won,” Cooney Horvath said. “We don’t see these as learning machines, we see them as entertainment.”
While digital technology can be indispensable for adults in the workplace, Cooney Horvath says that the effective use of technology requires expertise and the ability to vet, for example, the information AI may be producing or analyzing.
“In no other realm do we confuse kids for adults,” he says. “As soon as technology enters the equation, we treat kids like mini adults. As adults we are producing; as kids they are learning. The tools we use should not be the tools they use.”
While Cooney Horvath said that educational technology can be indispensable for supporting students with specific learning disabilities, for the average student educational technology is most often not well aligned with learning.
Watch the full webinar below.
