The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the Internet, watching TV or using some other form of media either “most” (31 percent) or “some” (25 percent) of the time that they are doing homework.Īt Woodside, as elsewhere, students’ use of technology is not uniform. Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke University who led some of the research, said that when adults were not supervising computer use, children “are left to their own devices, and the impetus isn’t to do homework but play around.” Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families.
“I realized there were choices,” Vishal recalls. He became increasingly engrossed in games and surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he describes as an inclination to procrastinate. He regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to videos that his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.”īut Vishal and his family say two things changed around the seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got a computer. He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.īut he also plays video games 10 hours a week. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software. The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with them. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.” “I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it. He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center. The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”īut even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks - and less able to sustain attention. Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning. Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters.
0 kommentar(er)
